She tried to be very friendly, and the young girl smiled and looked easily—the newspaper man thought almost defiantly—at her, but it was plain to the three onlookers that in some inscrutable way the meeting had been unfortunate, and they each felt relieved, in an inexplicable fashion, when dinner was announced and the snowy, gleaming length of damask and silver and wax lights stretched between the two women.
. . . . . . .
That night the Comte thought a good deal about the reception of his fiancée by the woman he had once loved, and decided that the American woman was a trifle exigeante, and wondered whether Mrs. Stanhope had really expected him never to marry.
The American Minister confided to his wife that he was disappointed in Eva Stanhope, and that she had always appeared so free from vanity and so superior to the little meannesses of women that he was very much surprised at the way she had acted.
The newspaper man, being exceedingly wise in his generation, smoked three cigars over it on the way to his hotel, and then—gave it up.
THE GENIUS OF BOWLDER BLUFF
MISS ARNOLD found him wandering aimlessly, though with a pleased, interested look, around the dimly lit College Library. She had gone there herself to escape for a few moments from the heat and lights and the crowd around the Scotch celebrity to whom the reception was being tendered, and was looking rather desultorily at an article in the latest Revue des Deux Mondes, when he emerged from one of the alcoves and stood hesitatingly before her. She saw that he was not a guest. He was not in evening dress—it occurred to her even then how entirely out of his element he would have looked in a conventional dress-suit—but wore new clothes of some rough material which fitted him badly. He was so evidently lost and so painfully aware of it that she hastened to ask him if she could do anything for him.
“I’m lookin’ fur my daughter, Ellen Oldham,” he said, gratefully. “Do you know her?”