But you do know it, Mr.Beaton, and I am sure you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here.

You are either interested in one of these young girls or you are not.

If you are, I have nothing more to say.

If you are not--" Mrs.Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.
Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself.

He had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses, but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty.