Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/110

 people out of ten will stifle their conscience and break faith with themselves for the pleasure of electrifying an audience with some unsuspected announcement. This trait is not altogether an unamiable one, as it springs from a certain gregarious instinct, curiosity and the ministering to it being the outgrowth or abuse of human sympathy.

Margaret twisted a slender thread of gold on her arm, and looked at Rondelet, appealing to his delicate tact to conjure the chill of constraint which had crept over the trio. Margaret was perhaps a little lacking in the great quality which is sometimes unwisely yclept a virtue. Rondelet possessed it to a remarkable degree, and the young sculptor had grown to look to him for the solution of all the knotty questions of social life which inevitably present themselves to a stranger in all societies. Though he had lived so little of his life in New Orleans, he knew all its traditions and prejudices, and instinctively divined the differing elements which composed it and the best way of treating them. Mrs. Darius Harden was one of the most prominent figures of the circle in which she moved. She had given the following account of herself to Margaret: "My father was a Virginian, my mother a New Yorker. I was born in San Francisco, raised in Kentucky, schooled