Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that, and he said to himself that the girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing seemed to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly wide open.

He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she had profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of Wetmore's ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful word that he dropped, too, and turned him to technical account whenever she could.
He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no question of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her future.

He began to construct a future for her; it included provision for himself, too; it was a common future, in which their lives and work were united.
He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at the reception.
The house was one where people might chat a long time together without publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such a grew out of each other's ideas.

Miss Vance was there because she united in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground.

It was almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it did not happen very often there.