"With pleasure," answered Pauline, feeling as if the request had been a sort of jeer. "You know my aunt by sight, then, Miss Upton?"
"Oh, yes, I've known her for some time by sight, Mrs. Varick. Miss Cragge pointed her out to me one night at Wallack's. She had a box, with her daughter and several other people. One of them was an English lord—or so Miss Cragge said.... But excuse my mentioning my friend's name, as you don't like her."
"Who told you that I did not like Miss Cragge?" asked Pauline, with abrupt crispness.
"Oh, nobody, nobody," hurried Miss Upton. "But you haven't invited her here to-night—you left her out, you know. That was all. And I thought...."
"Are you a friend of Miss Cragge's?" asked Pauline.
"Oh, yes ... that is, I know her quite well. She writes dramatic criticisms, you know, and she has seen me in amateur theatricals. She's kind enough to tell me that she doesn't think that I have a tragic soul in a comic body." Here Miss Upton gave a formidably resonant laugh. "But I'm convinced that I have, and so I've never gone on the stage. But if I could get a few of the very aristocratic people, Mrs. Varick,—like yourself, and your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie—to hear me give a private reading or two, from 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'The Hunchback' or 'Parthenia', why, I should be prepared to receive a new opinion, don't you understand, with regard to my abilities. There is nothing like being endorsed at the start by people who belong to the real upper circles of society."
"Of course there isn't," said Courtlandt, speaking too low for Miss Upton to catch his words, and almost in the ear of Pauline. "Introduce me," he went swiftly on. "I will save you the bore of further introductions. You will soon see how they will all flock about the great nabob, though she may be ignorant of æsthetics, philosophy, Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, and anybody you please."
Pauline turned and looked at him. There was the shadow of a sparkle in the familiar brown eyes—the eyes that she never regarded closely without being reminded of her girlhood, even of her childhood as well.
"It is a challenge then?" she asked softly.
For a second he seemed not to understand her. Then he nodded his head. "Yes—a challenge," he answered.