AVE you ever read any of Mary Haviland Norton?"

I didn't expect, when I put the question, to fall right into a mine of information. It was out of my line, moreover, to talk about authors and books at dinner. But the topic had popped inconsequently into my head, and there was certainly something about the quiet, sly-looking JaneAustenish woman at my left that inspired confidence.

"I'm distinctly curious about her," I added. "She's sprung up so soon, so authoritatively. And she's so new.

Up to this point my companion had only listened more quietly, more slyly, than ever; but her eyes now opened wide, her eyebrows went whimsically high, and she turned to me with a twinkling smile.

'New? You really think so?"

She gave me no time, either, to correct my statement.

"I didn't suppose any one still thought that except, possibly- Have you ever read Hurrell Oaks?"

I nodded gropingly.

"Miss Haviland was a teacher of mine at Newfair when it happened. That was eight, ten years ago. Do you see?" "I don't 'see' anything!"

"But you do Hurrell Oaks-you're, you're really all 'for' him, I mean? So you'd adore it! It's pathetic, too. Though it is funny!" she cried, avid to tell me more about whatever "it" was.

But the inevitable shift in table talk veered us apart at that moment; and it wasn't until after the long meal was over that we came together again, and could choose a quiet corner away from interruptions.

'Here goes, now," she began, "if you're ready!"

Miss Haviland must have been about

thirty when I first saw her. She was tall, handsome in an angular way. Her face was large, her features regular, though somewhat heavy, her coloring brilliant, and her dark hair grayish even then. She was of a stocky leanness, a ruggedness, that only made her pretentious garb and manner the more conspicuous.

To see her at those college parties! She wore black evening-gowns, and a string-a "rope," I think you could call it of imitation pearls, and carried a fan always, and a loose wrap with some bright lining, and fur on the neck and sleeves, which she'd just throw, as if carelessly, over her shoulders. We used irreverently to say that she had "corrupted" (one of her favorite words) the premise of the old motto, "When you're in Rome" to "Whether or not you're in Rome," so did she insist on being-or trying to be incongruously grande dame and not "of" the milieu she was privileged to adorn. Without ever letting herself mix with those gatherings really, she'd show her condescension by choosing a place in the most mixing group, and there carry out her aloofness by just smiling and peering reservedly at-at the way a man set a glass of water upon the table, for instance, as if that constituted enough to judge him by; as if he'd laid his soul, also, sufficiently bare to her in the process. And she must have been, as you've seen, a resourceful observer; she had a gift for reacting from people; though how much depended upon the people and what they did and said, and how much upon what she unconsciously consciously or consciously-adapted from Hurrell Oaks while she gauged them, is a question. The result at least fits the needs of a gaping public. But I'm drifting.

All this in fact, everything about her took George Norton by storm when he turned up, fresh from a fresh-water university farther west, to fill the Slocum professorship. He found in her the

splendor that he'd been stranded away from in "real life," and had never had time or imagination to find in books. She represented great, glorious things beyond his ken-civilization, culture, society, foreign lands across the sea for which his appetite had been whetted by the holiday tour he took to Bermuda after getting his A.B. with highest honors in history and government. He was about forty or so, and lived alone with his mother.

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Rumor had it (and it may have been well founded, it's so difficult to tell what goes on in the minds of those small, meek men), that he had always wanted to discover an "Egeria-like woman, and that, once he stepped into Mrs. Braxton's drawing-room and saw-and heard-Miss Haviland discoursing on "The Overtones in Swinburne's Prose," his wildest hope was realized. Be that as it may, his recognition must have been overpowering to have won her attention so easily; for her standards wouldn't have permitted her, by any stretch of imagination, to think of him as an Egeria's man-however she may have felt she merited one.

But she wasn't, with her looks and distinction and learning, the sort to attract men readily. She was too selfsufficient and flagrant, to begin with. She left no medium of approach suggested. She offered no tender, winning moments. Her aspect for men, as well as for women, implied that she thought she knew their ways and methods better than they did. This over-sureness shows as a weakness in her stories, I think the temerity with which she assumes the masculine rôle, the possible hollowness of her assumptions not once daunting her. Remember the one that begins, "I had just peeked into the bar of the Savoy Hotel"? I could never, when I read it, think of anything except just how Marian Haviland herself would look, in a black evening gown and her other regalia, "peeking' -as she no doubt longed to do. But I'm drifting again.... Her favor might have fired the heart of a grand seigneur, I don't know; to the men of Newfair it was too much like a corrective. George Norton, I guess, was the only one who ever craved it. He courted the

slavedom of learning to be her foremost satellite.

His courting went on at all the assemblages. The moment he entered a room, you could see her drawing him like a magnet; and him drawn, atomlike, with his little round beard and swallow-tail coat and parsonish white cravat, to wherever she ensconced herself. No sooner would he get near than she'd address a remark almost lavishly to somebody on the other side, and not deign to notice until the topic had been well developed, and then she would only frown 'round distantly and say:

"Mr. Norton, how are you this evening?"

But he would bob, and smirk consciously, up and down on his toes, and slap one hand against the other in an appreciative manner; undismayed if she looked away to talk quite exclusively to somebody else for another five minutes, just perhaps glancing fugitively over at him again to suggest:

"It's too bad you must stand, Mr. Norton." Or, when another pause came, "Can't you find a chair?"

But you could see her still holding him fast behind her while she finished her own chat, and before she had leisure to release him at last with some cue like:

"That chair, perhaps, over there-no, there, Mr. Norton."

Nice little man! He would fetch the

very chair. He would even keep it suspended in the air until she pointed out the exact spot and, with eyes and eyebrows tense, nodded approval of her scheme asking him, however, after he was seated, to stand a moment, so she could move her own chair a bit farther to the right, away from the person whose foot had been planted, as she all the time knew, upon a rung of it.

He would yearn up to her presently and murmur, "A beautiful room, don't you think, Miss Haviland?"