“Inexperienced!” Renton retorted.  “I don’t want any more experience of the kind Ellen has given us.”

“I don’t mean that.  I mean—­this Mr. Breckon.  I can’t tell what attracts him in the child.  She must appear very crude and uncultivated to him.  You needn’t resent it so!  I know she’s read a great deal, and you’ve made her think herself intellectual—­but the very simple-heartedness of the way she would show out her reading would make such a young man see that she wasn’t like the girls he was used to.  They would hide their intellectuality, if they had any.  It’s no use your trying to fight it Mr. Kenton.  We are country people, and he knows it.”

“Tuskingum isn’t country!” the judge declared.

“It isn’t city.  And we don’t know anything about the world, any of us.  Oh, I suppose we can read and write!  But we don’t know the a, b, c of the things he, knows.  He, belongs to a kind of society—­of people —­in New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never imagined before.  They made me feel very belated and benighted—­as if I hadn’t, read or thought anything.  They didn’t mean to; but I couldn’t help it, and they couldn’t.”

“You—­you’ve been frightened out of your propriety by what you’ve seen in New York,” said her husband.

“I’ve been frightened, certainly.  And I wish you had been, too.  I wish you wouldn’t be so conceited about Ellen.  It scares me to see you so.  Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone!  You must see that.  And she doesn’t dress like the girls he’s used to.  I know we’ve got her things in New York; but she doesn’t wear them like a New-Yorker.  I hope she isn’t going in for more unhappiness!”

At the thought of this the judge’s crest fell.  “Do you believe she’s getting interested in him?” he asked, humbly.

“No, no; I don’t say that.  But promise me you won’t encourage her in it.  And don’t, for pity’s sake, brag about her to him.”

“No, I won’t,” said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.

The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview with his wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung convalescently along the promenade on their steamer-chairs.  These, so far as they were women, were of such sick plainness that when he came to Ellen his heart throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother’s aspersion of her health and beauty.  She looked not only very well, and very pretty, but in a gay red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her father’s uncritical eyes, very stylish.  The glow left his heart at eight of the empty seat beside her.

“Where is Lottie?” he asked, though it was not Lottie’s whereabouts that interested him.

“Oh, she’s walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere,” said Ellen.

“Then she’s made up her mind to tolerate him, has she?” the father asked, more lightly than he felt.

Ellen smiled.  “That wasn’t anything very serious, I guess.  At any rate, she’s walking with him.”