Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/160

 and from her society friends she heard of him constantly. He seemed, like herself, equally well known in both circles. She was surprised and pleased to discover that his presence at social affairs she was forced to attend made those functions unusually endurable to her. Of course, she reasoned, the explanation of this lay in the edifying conversations they held concerning their common interests in the slums. His hospitals, her model tenements and settlements, were subjects worthy of the attention of intelligent minds. But subsequently she remembered that evenings equally enjoyable and brief in the passing had been spent by them in animated conversations on topics of music and literature. Her protégés had not been introduced, even parenthetically. The reflection was startling to Miss Twombly, whose conscience immediately touched a warning bell. When Dr. Schuyler met her after that they worried the meat from the conversational bone of Sanitary Tenement Buildings and parted with mutual dissatisfaction. It was at this point that Miss Twombly obviously shunned Dr. Schuyler, while society, with an expansive smile, proceeded to fix its eyes upon the two. Here, also, this tale properly begins.

Love, when it becomes part of the experience of a repressed and self-contained girl with a