“And, Cally,” he added, pinching her cheek, “I want you to have a good time this winter, remember.  You can have anything you want.  Go everywhere you’re invited—­enjoy yourself with your friends—­have a good time.  D’you hear me?”

She said that she did:  and as she spoke, a bitter question rose at her.  Who were her friends?  She had always thought of herself as having many; “hosts of friends” had always figured prominently in her inventories of her blessings.  But what was a friend?  Among all these people she had spent her life with, there was not one, it seemed, who cared to understand the infinite shadings of thought and impulse that had brought her to where she now stood; much less one heart which saw intuitively

     All the world’s coarse thumb
     And finger failed to plumb...

Papa was adding, with an unconscious frown: 

“The cash is in the bank, if your mother must have it.  I’d laid it by for something else, though—­make some repairs at the Works.  Come in....  I reckon I’ve staved off ...”

Considered from one angle, these fragmentary words might have been illuminating; but Cally did not even hear them.  At that moment there happened the unexpected.  The parlormaid Annie entered, announcing Mrs. Berkeley Page to see Miss Carlisle.

Surprise was expressed in the study.  This was the lady who had said that the Heths were very improbable people.  Papa opined, somewhat glumly, that she had come to beg funds for the confounded Settlement.  Cally, having looked at herself in the mirror, trailed into the drawing-room with a somewhat cool and challenging civility.

But her coolness soon melted away, under the visitor’s strange but seemingly genuine cordiality.  It became clear that she had come in the vein of amity, and without sinister motives; though why, if not for Settlement funds, could not be imagined.

Mrs. Page was a tall, pleasant-faced woman, still on the right side of forty, a widow whose husband had left her too much of this world’s goods for her ever to be classed as a poorhouse Tory; and despite the fact that she was a leader in the old-school, as opposed to the brass-band, set, many people considered her a very agreeable woman.  She had amusing things to say, and she said them in the Heth drawing-room with no air of awkwardness.  Carlisle, somewhat against her will, was soon thinking her extremely attractive.  But the thawing out went further than that.

Talk turned by chance—­or perhaps it was not chance exactly—­on those growing currents of feminine activity which had nothing to do with dinners and dances:  and here the visitor expressed ideas which did not seem old-school in the least.  It appeared that she, Mary Page, in the period of her spinsterhood, for she hadn’t been married till she was twenty-six, a thoroughgoing old maid in those days,—­had also wearied of the gay round; she had desired to do something.  But alas, she had suddenly discovered that she wasn’t fitted to do one earthly thing, having been trained only to be a trimming.  She said, smiling, that she had cried all one day about it....