dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest." She laughed for
enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.

Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which
the talk was always assuming. "Have you been to the fall exhibition?" she
asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction she
seemed sunk in.

"The exhibition?" She looked at Mrs. Mandel.

"The pictures of the Academy, you know," Mrs. Mandel explained. "Where I
wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on."

"No; we haven't been yet. Is it good?" She had turned to Mrs. March
again.

"I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones. But
there are some good pictures."

"I don't believe I care much about pictures," said Christine. "I don't
understand them."

"Ah, that's no excuse for not caring about them," said March, lightly.
"The painters themselves don't, half the time."

The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing,
insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she
stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister's babble. In the
light of Fulkerson's history of the family, its origin and its ambition,
he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an ignorant