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Rh perfectly. Was she likely to forget him? But he, Mrs. Simonson respectfully submitted, was not a singer, but a commercial traveler.

Miss Kling shook her head.

"That experience should be a warning! You cannot deny that no young woman of a modest and retiring disposition would seek to place herself in a public position. Can you imagine me upon the stage?" concluded Miss Kling with great dignity.

Mrs. Simonson was free to admit that her imagination could contemplate no such possibility, and then, neither desirous of criticising a good paying lodger, or of offending Miss Kling—that struggle with the ways and means having taught her to offend no one if it could possibly be avoided—she changed the subject by expatiating at length upon a topic she always found safe—the weather. But Miss Celeste Fishblate coming in, Miss Kling left the weather to take care of itself, and returned to the more interesting discussion, to her, of Miss Archer.

Celeste, a young lady favored with a countenance that impressed the beholder as being principally nose and teeth, and possessing a large share of the commodity known as gush, was ready enough to be the recipient of her neighbor's collection of gossip. But, to Miss Kling's no small disgust, she was rather lukewarm in pre-judging the new-comer. 5