They do
not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help
themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure
you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are
either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you are,
I have nothing more to say. If you are not--" Mrs. Mandel continued to
smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.
Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He
had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be
sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,
but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and
sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his
senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened, and
then turned an angry pallor. "Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you ask
this from the young ladies?"
"Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, and with something in
her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of
her authority in the form of a sneer. "As I have suggested, they would
hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter.
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