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Mrs. Valentin became restless.

“Is that the evening paper?” she asked.

The bishop glanced at the paper. “And who,” said he, “is to open the gates of sunrise for our Elsie? With whom do you intend to place her in Boston?”

“Oh, with Mrs. Barrington.”

Mrs. Valentin was watching the bishop, whose eyes still rested upon Elsie.

“She is to be one of the chosen five, is she? The five wise virgins–of the East? But they are all Western virgins this year, I believe.”

“If you mean that they are all from the Western States, I think you are mistaken, Bishop.”

“Am I? Let us see. There is Elsie, and Gladys Castant, perhaps, and the daughters of my friend Mr. Laws of West Dakota”–

“Bishop!”

“Of West Dakota; that makes four. And then the young lady who was on the train with you, Miss Bigelow, from Los Angeles.”

“Bishop! I am certain you are mistaken there. If those people are not Eastern, then I’m from West Dakota myself!”

“We are all from West Dakota virtually, so far as Mecca is concerned. But Mrs. Barrington offers her young ladies those exceptional social opportunities which Western girls are supposed to need. If you want Elsie to be with Eastern girls of the East, let her go to a good Boston Latin school. Did you not go to one yourself, Mrs. Valentin?”

Mrs. Valentin laughed. “That was ages ago, and I was at home. I had the environment–an education in itself. Won’t you dine with us, Bishop? We shall have dinner in half an hour.”

“In half an hour I must be on the limited express. You seem to have made different connections.”

“‘The error was, we started wrong,'” said Mrs. Valentin lightly. “We took the morning instead of the evening train. But I was convinced we should be left, and I preferred to get left by the wrong train and have the right one to fall back on.” She ceased her babble, as vain words die when there is a sense of no one listening.

Elsie stood at the window looking back into the room. She thought, “Mother doesn’t know what she is saying. What is she worried about?”

The bishop was writing with a gold pencil on the margin of the newspaper. He folded it with the writing on top.

“If you had consulted me about that child,”–he looked at Elsie,–“I should have said, ‘Do not hurry her–do not hurry her. Her education will come as God sends it.’ With experience, as with death, it is the prematureness that hurts.”

His beautiful voice and perfect accent filled the silence with heart-warmed cadences.

“Well, good-by, Mrs. Valentin. Remember me to that busy husband.”

Mrs. Valentin rose; the bishop took her hand. “Elsie will see me to the elevator. This is the evening paper.”

He offered it with the writing toward her. Mrs. Valentin read what he had written: “Billy Castant was killed in the charge at San Juan. Every man in that fight deserves the thanks of the nation.”

“Come, Elsie, see me to my carriage,” the bishop was saying. He placed the girl’s hand on his arm and led her out of the room. At the elevator grating they waited a moment; the cold draft up the shaft fanned the hair back from Elsie’s forehead as she stood looking down, watching the ascent of the cage.

“It would be a happy thing,” said the bishop, “if parents could always go with their children on these long roads of experience; but there are some roads the boys and the girls will have to take alone. We shall all meet at the other end, though–we shall all meet at the end.”

Elsie walked up and down the hall awhile, dreading to go back to the room. A band in the street below was playing an old war-song of the sixties, revived this battle summer of ’98,–a song that was sung when the cost of that war was beginning to tell, “We shall meet, but we shall miss him.” Elsie knew the music; she had not yet learned the words.

Next morning Mr. Valentin received one of his wife’s vague but thrifty telegrams, dated at Chicago, on Sunday night, July 3:

“We cannot go through with it. Expect us home Wednesday.”

Mrs. Valentin had spent hours, years, in explaining to Elsie’s father the many cogent and crying reasons for taking her East to be finished. It needed not quite five minutes to explain why she had brought her back.

Strangely, none of the friends of the family asked for an explanation of this sudden change of plan. But Elsie envies Gladys her black clothes, and the privilege of crying in public when the bands play and the troops go by.

“Such children–such mere children!” Mrs. Valentin sighs.

But she no longer speaks to Elsie about wrinkling her forehead or showing her boot-soles. It is eye to eye and heart to heart, and only straight talk between them now, as between women who know.