churches, as the schoolmaster used to at the houses in the old times."

Mi's. Gaylord looked up at the clock, and gave a little nervous laugh.
"I don't know what Marcia will say to my letting her company stay in the
sitting-room. She's pretty late to-day. But I guess you won't have much
longer to wait, now."

She spoke with that awe of her daughter and her judgments which is one of
the pathetic idiosyncrasies of a certain class of American mothers. They
feel themselves to be not so well educated as their daughters, whose
fancied knowledge of the world they let outweigh their own experience of
life; they are used to deferring to them, and they shrink willingly into
household drudges before them, and leave them to order the social affairs
of the family. Mrs. Gaylord was not much afraid of Bartley for himself, but
as Marcia's company he made her more and more uneasy toward the end of the
quarter of an hour in which she tried to entertain him with her simple
talk, varying from Mr. Gaylord to Marcia, and from Marcia to Mr. Gaylord
again. When she recognized the girl's quick touch in the closing of the
front door, and her elastic step approached through the hall, the mother
made a little deprecating noise in her throat, and fidgeted in her chair.
As soon as Marcia opened the sitting-room door, Mrs. Gaylord modestly rose
and went out into the kitchen: the mother who remained in the room when her
daughter had company was an oddity almost unknown in Equity.

Marcia's face flashed all into a light of joy at sight of Bartley, who
scarcely waited for her mother to be gone before he drew her toward him
by the hand she had given. She mechanically yielded; and then, as if the
recollection of some new resolution forced itself through her pleasure at
sight of him, she freed her hand, and, retreating a step or two, confronted
him.