She had watched with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds of self-devotion.She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire withdrawal from the world in a life of good works.Before now,girls had entered the Protestant sisterhoods,which appeal so potently to the young and generous imagination,and Margaret was of just the temperament to be influenced by them.During the past summer she had been unhappy at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring,and she had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.
Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she befriended.Mrs.Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers.This,of course,had its ludicrous side,in connection with a young lady in good society,and a person of even so little humor as Mrs.Horn could not help seeing it.At the same time,she could not help foreboding the worst from it;she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline.She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she could employ.At an age when such things weary,she threw herself into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her;and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her course from ball to ball,from reception to reception,from parlor-reading to parlor-reading,from musicale to musicale,from play to play,from opera to opera.She tasted,after she had practically renounced them,the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement,in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet,and now at the end she had to own to herself that she had failed.It was coming Lent again,and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs.Horn felt that she was throwing her youth away.Margaret could have borne either alone,but together they were wearing her out.She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her,but she could not forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.
She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings for the entertainment,and,as she hoped,the elevation of her working-women;but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once occupied her;and,at sight of Beaton talking with her,Mrs.Horn caught at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving Margaret's former interest in art.She asked him if Mr.Wetmore had his classes that winter as usual;and she said she wished Margaret could be induced to go again:Mr.Wetmore always said that she did not draw very well,but that she had a great deal of feeling for it,and her work was interesting.She asked,were the Leightons in town again;and she murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them,without explaining why;she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew Miss Leighton,and what she was doing,it might stimulate her,perhaps.
She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art?Beaton said,Oh yes,he believed so.
But his manner did not encourage Mrs.Horn to pursue her aims in that direction,and she said,with a sigh,she wished he still had a class;she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than from any one else's.
He said that she was very good;but there was really nobody who knew half as much as Wetmore,or could make any one understand half as much.
Mrs.Horn was afraid,she said,that Mr.Wetmore's terrible sincerity discouraged Margaret;he would not let her have any illusions about the outcome of what she was doing;and did not Mr.Beaton think that some illusion was necessary with young people?Of course,it was very nice of Mr.Wetmore to be so honest,but it did not always seem to be the wisest thing.She begged Mr.Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a little less severe.Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who were coming up and going away,and Beaton perceived that he was dismissed.
He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed to concerning Margaret,and then he began to chafe at what she had said of Wetmore's honesty,apropos of her wish that he still had a class himself.Did she mean,confound her?that he was insincere,and would let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had?The more Beaton thought of this,the more furious he became,and the more he was convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not consciously in her mind.He framed some keen retorts,to the general effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at home,Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies.Having just determined never to go near Mrs.Horn's Thursdays again,he decided to go once more,in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat callous bosom;and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point from which he should launch it.
In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace,such as only unqualified worship could give him;a cruel wish to feel his power in some direction where,even if it were resisted,it could not be overcome,drove him on.That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of artificiality should intimate,however innocently--the innocence made it all the worse--that he was less honest than Wetmore,whom he knew to be so much more honest,was something that must be retaliated somewhere before his self-respect could be restored.It was only five o'clock,and he went on up-town to the Dryfooses',though he had been there only the night before last.He asked for the ladies,and Mrs.Mandel received him.
