That very evening, dropping in to the Misses Graham's and partaking of a bleakly feminine meal, he laid his lance in rest for her.
Miss Mary was full of flurried apologies at the meagerness of the supper-table, but old Miss Eliza said, with spirit, that bread and milk would be good for him! "Now, tell us about that child, Arthur," she commanded.
"You mean Fred Payton, I suppose?" he said, raising an annoyed eyebrow. "I don't call her a 'child.'"
"You are quite right," Miss Mary agreed, in her little neutral voice; "she is certainly old enough to know how to behave herself."
"It's merely that she wants to reform the world," Miss Eliza said, soothingly. "Reformers have no humor, and, of course, no taste;—or else they wouldn't be reformers!"
"Your dear cousin Eliza is too kind-hearted," Miss Mary said; but her own kind, if conventional, heart made her listen sympathetically enough to the visitor's excusing recital of the hardships of Fred's life.
Once, she interrupted him by saying that it was, of course, painful—the afflicted brother. And once she said she hoped that Miss Payton was a comfort to her mother—"though I don't see how she can be, off every day at what she calls her 'office'—a word only to be applied, it seems to me, to places where gentlemen conduct their business. When I was young, Arthur, a girl's first duty was in her home."
"Perhaps there is nothing for her to do at home," Miss Eliza said.