She looked up when he entered, and there was in her young girl face the very slightest shade of recognition.  She could not help it, for Clemency was candor itself.  Then she bowed very formally, and shook hands sedately when Doctor Gordon introduced James as Doctor Elliot, his new assistant, and carried off her part very well.  James was not so successful.  He colored and was somewhat confused, but nobody appeared to notice it.  Clemency went on relating how glad she was that Uncle Tom met her as she was coming home from Annie Lipton’s.  “I am never afraid,” said she, and her little face betrayed the lie, “but I was tired, and besides I was beginning to be cold, for I went out without my fur.”

“You should not have gone without it.  It grows so cold when the sun goes down,” said Mrs. Ewing.  Then a chime of Japanese bells was heard which announced dinner.

“Doctor Elliot will be glad of dinner,” said Doctor Gordon.  “He has walked all the way from Gresham.”

Clemency looked at him with approval, and tried to look as if she had never seen him walking in her life.  “That is a good walk,” said she.  “Twenty-five miles it must be.  If more men walked instead of working poor horses all the time, it would be better for them.”

“That is a hint for your Uncle Tom,” said Gordon laughingly.

“I never hint,” said Clemency.  “It is just a plain statement.  Men are walking animals.  They could travel as well as horses in the course of time if they only put their minds to it.”

“Well, your old uncle’s bones must be saved, even at the expense of the horse’s,” said Doctor Gordon.

“Bones are improved by use,” said Clemency severely, as she took her seat at the dinner-table.  They all laughed.  The girl herself relaxed her pretty face with a whimsical smile.  It was quite evident that Clemency was the spoiled and petted darling of the house, and that she traded innocently upon the fact.  The young doctor, although his first impression of the elder woman was still upon him, yet realized the charm of the young girl.  The older woman was, as it were, crowned with an aureole of perfection, but the young girl was crowned with possibilities which dazzled with mystery.  She looked prettier, now that her outer garments were removed, and her thick crown of ash-blonde hair was revealed.  The lamp lit her eyes into bluer flame.  She was a darling of a young girl, and more a darling because she had the sweetest confidence in everybody thinking her one.

However, James Elliot, sitting in the well-appointed dining-room, which was more like a city house than a little New Jersey dwelling, did not for a second retreat from his first impression of Mrs. Ewing.  Behind the coffee-urn sat the woman with whom he had not fallen in love, that was too poor a term to use.  He had become a worshipper.  He felt himself, body and soul, prostrate before the Divinity of Womanhood itself.  He realized the grandeur of the abstract