"You are a dear to give me this luncheon," she began.
The old gentleman bowed a courtly head.
"I have been envied, I think, by all my more youthful fellow members here," he said. "And that is very pleasant, even when one might be supposed to have passed the age of vanity."
"Thank you, Uncle Silas. No one of your fellow members could have said a nicer thing than that." She fingered her coffee cup. "But I had a reason for inviting myself—practically—to lunch with you. I want to ask your advice."
"I'm afraid I should be inclined in advance to let you do exactly as you liked, my child," said the other, with a smile. "But what is it? I hope it's not trouble of any sort."
"No—it's not trouble, exactly," his niece responded. "It's more like—well, like dissatisfaction. I am awfully tired of being a perfectly useless person, with no definite end and aim. You don't suppose it's because I see every day the girls coming down to work, on the Massachusetts Avenue cars, do you? I went a little while ago to my doctor's because I thought perhaps there was something the matter with me, and he suggested a change of air, but I think he mixed up the cause with the effect. Perhaps I do need a change, but it's a change of interests and a change of what I see and hear and talk about."
"Commonly termed a vacation," said Mr. Osgood.
"Yes, a vacation—that's it. Not a vacation from doing anything, because I've done nothing, but a vacation from the atmosphere I've been living in."
"You mean the artistic atmosphere?" her uncle asked. "You are a little tired of—"
"I'm more than a little—I'm horribly tired of imitations and poses and make-believes. I want to see things and people who really live, who don't exist by the light of crimson-shaded globes and spend their days dreaming about impressions and arrangements and tones and shadows."