"Because her opportunity has been killed."
"Was it ever alive?" Henry asked.
"Oh, yes, but it is dead now. Mother, you ought to see the young woman I saw at Henry's office the other day. Look, he's trying to blush. Oh, she's dazzling with her great blue eyes."
Mrs. Witherspoon's look demanded an explanation.
"Mother," said Henry, "she means our book-reviewer."
"I don't like literary women," Mrs. Witherspoon replied, with stress in the movement of her head and with prejudice in the compression of her lips. "They are too—too uppish, I may say."
"But Miss Drury makes no literary pretensions," Henry rejoined.
"I should think not," Ellen spoke up. "I didn't take her to be literary, she was so neatly dressed."
"When you cease so lightly to discuss a noble-minded girl—a friend of mine—you will do me a great favor," Henry replied.
"What's all this?" Witherspoon asked. He had paid no attention to this trifling set-to and had caught merely the last accent of it.