TEA was being served in Winslow's art gallery, where a carved screen had been set to cut off a corner of the long room.
As Hildegarde and her father rounded the edge of the screen, they were hailed with enthusiasm by the group which had gathered.
Mrs. Hulburt was there and Miss Anne and Sally and Bob Gresham, and a half dozen young people who belonged to Sally's crowd.
They had made Hildegarde one of them. Yet she was not like them. She was surrounded, as it were, by little walls of reticence and aloofness, which none of their modern ideas had as yet battered down. Just as she wore her hair braided, while other heads were bobbed, so she kept the habit of her mind different. It was, perhaps, this very difference in her which drew Bob Gresham. He was satiated by modernity. "I wish the girls would go back to their grandmother's ways," he was at the moment declaiming, "I'd like 'em afraid of mice. They made a man feel like a conquering hero—. He could save her from a mouse and she fainted in his arms."
"Hildegarde's afraid of mice," Sally informed him.
"Are you?" Gresham demanded of Hildegarde.
