It was the evening of the conversazione. Selina, dear child, as Auntie called her, pretty and flushed and frankly excited, wore the discredited graduation dress, furbished up once more by Mamma, and yet once more pressed by Aunt Viney.

"Never, never again do we let her wear garments not her own," said Mamma as Selina went down to welcome those first arrivals, the friends of her youth.

"Thanks be, Lavinia, for that," said Auntie. "Maybe you'll come around to my view of the mental furbelows next."

When Selina reached her friends below, she found Amanthus in yellow. With a pretty mother who dressed well herself Amanthus always had charming clothes. The corn-colored knotted sash and ribbons worn by her to-night were the color of her abundant hair, and her fan of yellow feathers seemed planned to open against her red lower lip while her face dimpled and sparkled above it.

It was handsome Maud's self one saw, animated and sure and leading. You hardly thought about, if you noted at all, her val-edged flounces and her string of beads, though you did rejoice in her clear white and red skin and her red-brown hair. Auntie said, you felt the courage and vigor of Maud's Presbyterian forebears in her straightforwardness if she did belie them in her impulsiveness.

Pretty Juliette's cheeks subdued her cherry ribbons, little gypsy thing, and Adele's throat rose soft and white from her round-necked blue cashmere. As for Miss Pocahontas Boswell who arrived here—but how put into words that simplicity which is not simplicity at all, about her amber draperies? Or how make plain the appreciation and interest in her smiling eyes?

Mrs. William Williams, hearing of the occasion, had sent Selina a box of hot-house flowers, half a dozen kinds at least laid on a bedding of wet smilax, the endeavor in those days being for variety and assemblage of colors. Combined with the smilax the whole made a mixed bowlful for the table between the lace curtains of the two windows and, so Selina felt, lent a riotous air of preparation and festivity to the parlors.

And now the remainder of the guests came, or seemed to come, at once. Papa out in the hall, was shaking hands and exchanging little sallies and seeing to the disposition of coats and hats, after which, having sent, seen and brought the arrivals to the last one in, he went back to his paper in the next room.

It was restoring to a hostess' anxious spirits now the actual moment was come, to enumerate these arrivals in greeting them and in presenting them to Miss Boswell. What can be more to the credit of a hostess than an excess of the other sex?

Here were Bliss and Brent and Sam of their own set. But can it be that familiarity in the long run does breed—well, an uncompromising eye? For Bliss and Brent and Sam looked—it was the dismaying truth—they looked young! They acted young, too, falling back the one against the other at the parlor door, and reddening as they took the hand of the guest as if they did not know what to do with it! And pretty Bliss, rather spoiled on that account if the truth be told, with his ruddy hair and his rosy checks, to have put on a pink neck-tie!

Culpepper and his friends arriving just here, made a gratifying and convincing show: Mr. Cannon, alert and good-looking, enlivened by a white vest; Mr. Tate, tall and decorous; Mr. Welling, square-set and in spectacles. These with Culpepper were a force in themselves.

Bringing up the close came first the Reverend Mr. Wingham. Was it his high vest or his high calling that gave the distinctive quality to his good looks? And lastly came Algernon Charles Biggs, Culpepper evidently on the lookout for him.

Algy was fearfully gloomy. As the company sat down he took his chair with a furtive unwillingness, Culpepper seating himself near him almost as if by intention.

With this exception, Selina felt, everything was quite comme il faut, as Maude loved to say of an occasion, and even impressive and needless to say, gratifying. Everybody sat around, the open grate the center, so to speak, the firelight flickering on Auntie's especially burnished fender and coal-bucket and fire-irons.

By the connivance of the four, Selina, Juliette, Maud and Adele, Mr. Wingham was seated next Miss Boswell. He had shown brisk pleasure on being presented to tall and dashing Maud and seemed willing to linger and parry sallies with her; he had warmed, everybody warmed to Juliette; while within the minute he was taking issue on some general proposition with Adele. But these introductory passages over, they passed him on to his place for the evening.

Bliss, pretty, pouty boy, on whom Amanthus had been smiling since she dismissed Tommy, was sulky because she, from some perversity, was off to herself in an unillumined spot as it were, between the bookcase and the door. Yet she illumined it; she was a lovely creature.

"'Like sunshine in a shady spot,'" Selina and Adele who were near together heard Miss Boswell say to Mr. Wingham, and his attention thus directed to Amanthus, he heartily agreed.

Then Selina charmingly flushed beneath the crown of her fair hair, could she but have known it, and prettily anxious, became aware that Maud had coughed, was coughing again. It was the signal agreed upon. There came a rushing as of the seas in her ears, a sinking in the pit of her person. Had they allowed Maud to coerce them into something ill-advised again? Was Auntie right? Were they about to make themselves preposterous and ridiculous? And what had Culpepper said—Culpepper there across the circle next to Algy? That girls played at having a knowledge that men had? Was he laughing at them now with that same look of lenient enjoyment in his bold blue eyes that he usually gave to Auntie? Tears almost of anger were in her eyes.

Not at all! She had had these hideous moments preceding the actual plunge before, precursors always to the later joys of triumph. As, for example, when she used to lead in the debate at The Sappho, and at call for her secretarial report at the junior missionary society, and again at the moment of her figuring at her graduation. Surely she knew them for what they were now!

Maud had given definite instructions beforehand. "Let your start seem casual, Selina, the mere off-throw from passing reflections."

And, recalling this and drawing a restoring breath of confidence, Selina spoke to the circle of her guests, endeavoring to convey ease along with the proposition which was to furnish subject and substance for the conversazione, in a voice which would not be quite steady.

"But is there not a denial of the truth that the moral is necessarily part with the beautiful, in such phrases as 'art for art's sake,' 'beauty for the sake of beauty'? So Selina."

Maud, as per arrangement and program, came sweepingly to the retort direct, which she had taken from a volume belonging to The Sappho's library, called "Prepared Debates." As she had pointed out, there's nothing like getting the requisite impetus at the start!

"The moral changes with the times, the place and the peoples. Art is as fixed as the gulf between itself and the ethical obligation is wide."

Juliette, with cheeks afire, rushed gallantly in, also as prearranged by Maud, she being scheduled to be off-hand, playful and staccato. She was to fling the proposition on at this point to one of the guests, having been instructed which one:

"If eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being,"

said she gayly and insouciantly. "Isn't it so, er—Mr. Wingham?"

That very good-looking and well-set-up young clergyman across the circle next to Miss Boswell, started ever so slightly at this call upon him by name. He had been looking at Amanthus, lovely creature, who needed neither vocabulary nor repartee either, in her business of life!

"It is," he agreed a little hastily; then gathering himself smilingly together he said heartily, "It is eminently and conclusively its own excuse and justification."

This coming from Mr. Wingham was a bit dismaying, as from the nature of his cloth and calling, he had been counted on to take the moral issue up at this point. It brought matters to an unprepared-for pause.

"The Puritan—" hurriedly began conscientious Adele, but with a glance at Maud, stopped. The Puritan, as taken from "Prepared Debates," was to follow in logical sequence after the support and exposition of the moral by Mr. Wingham. Adele swallowed, and withdrew.

Whereupon support for the moral came from the other side of the circle, from Culpepper nobly and by no sort of prearrangement either. One could wish he would show more conviction and less jocularity about it, however. The progenitors of this evening's business were of no mind by now to be played with. Two of the friends of Culpepper, also, Mr. Welling and Mr. Cannon, would bear looking after. Their markedly polite attention almost would seem to cover ecstacy and enjoyment.

"In the ideals of that great old people, the Greeks," queried Culpepper jocularly, "somehow I seem to recall that the symmetry of the human body was the expression of the symmetry of the inner soul?"

Mr. Welling, he of the square person, resettled his spectacles. "As for example, Aesop? Or shall we say Socrates?"

Mr. Cannon of the white vest burbled, then coughed to cover his defection.

"The Puritan—" here ventured in Adele again, with an eye as to its being proper business on Maud, who frowned darkly, whereupon Adele, flushed but obedient again withdrew.

Tall Mr. Tate, the third of the friends of Culpepper, had looked across each time at Adele's remark twice ventured and twice withdrawn. With the exceptions of these glances in her direction, he like Mr. Wingham, had been looking at Amanthus. Even so, something of what Maud called scholastic earnestness sat upon Mr. Tate, and he was disposed, too, to treat the evening with gratifying sincerity. There was that in the subject twice introduced and twice withdrawn by the young lady in blue as he afterward designated Adele, which evidently appealed to him to the momentary eclipsing of Amanthus' charms.

"The Puritan—" he took the suggestion up the least bit sententiously and with courteous acknowledgment toward the source of its origin, "that great timely force for moral power which is moral beauty, was——"

Mr. Cannon indisputably naughty by this time, pulled down his white vest and wickedly concluded the sentence—"'was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the up-turned whites to his eyes'—how does the rest of the paragraph go, Welling?" Which was not in the least what Mr. Tate nor yet Adele had in mind to say.

But even so, was not this the mounting joy of wit? Of give and take? Of stimulation? This the hitherto imagined delight of social intercourse?

So Selina. But a hostess must keep a hostess' wit and head! Everyone must be won and led to speak! But wait, Miss Boswell, and smiling as with one lending herself prettily to the moment, is talking:

"In speaking of beauty perhaps we're thinking a bit too much of the quality in an object which in regarding it excites pleasing emotions? Surely we're to believe that the terms of beauty apply to qualities that arouse admiration and approval. I for one shall insist on there being intellectual and moral beauty—and beauty of goodness and utility. But if I understand just right, Mr. Biggs here is far better qualified to define beauty than the rest of us. And with a great poet's authority behind him, too!"

Big, handsome, gloomy Algy nearly fell over with his chair which at the moment he was uneasily balancing on one leg as some perception of what he was in dawned on him.

"I—Oh say now, any of 'em will tell you I've never read a word of him in my life. Never could find the hitch—er—don't you know, between the words and the sense. Quit it, will you, Culpepper, kicking me?"

"'A thing of beauty is a joy forever!'" gayly chanted dependable little Juliette who true to the program was to throw herself and her munitions into breaches as needed.

"'Handsome is as handsome does,'" suddenly observed Bliss, very young and passing bitter, with an obviousness patent to those who understood the evening's coolness between him and Amanthus, "'Beauty is only skin deep.'" Could it be that Bliss had noted the glances of two of the company, Mr. Wingham and Mr. Tate, fixed upon Amanthus even now?

"And yet," it was the first spontaneous contribution to the evening from the Reverend Mr. Wingham, his gaze returning from that retired corner where it had been drawn again and again, "the eternal youth of the beautiful!" Certainly Amanthus did not need vocabulary or repartee in the least!

Adele with new courage, and this time at a signal from Maud, began again: "The Puritan through his great exponent——"

The doorbell rang. Kind conventions! Comme il faut! Had Selina really been congratulating herself in these gratifying terms?

It was Cousin Marcus Bruce; she recognized his voice as Papa let him in.