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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Europeans, By Henry James*
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+The Europeans, by Henry James
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+November, 1994  [Etext #179]
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+
+
+
+
+THE EUROPEANS
+
+by
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city,
+seen from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no
+time an object of enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle
+is not at its best when the mouldy tombstones and funereal
+umbrage have received the ineffectual refreshment of a dull,
+moist snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened by this
+frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that
+the blessed vernal season is already six weeks old, it will be
+admitted that no depressing influence is absent from the scene.
+This fact was keenly felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of
+thirty years since, by a lady who stood looking out of one of
+the windows of the best hotel in the ancient city of Boston.
+She had stood there for half an hour--stood there, that is,
+at intervals; for from time to time she turned back into
+the room and measured its length with a restless step.
+In the chimney-place was a red-hot fire which emitted
+a small blue flame; and in front of the fire, at a table,
+sat a young man who was busily plying a pencil.
+He had a number of sheets of paper cut into small equal squares,
+and he was apparently covering them with pictorial designs--
+strange-looking figures.  He worked rapidly and attentively,
+sometimes threw back his head and held out his drawing at
+arm's-length, and kept up a soft, gay-sounding humming and whistling.
+The lady brushed past him in her walk; her much-trimmed skirts
+were voluminous.  She never dropped her eyes upon his work;
+she only turned them, occasionally, as she passed, to a mirror
+suspended above the toilet-table on the other side of the room.
+Here she paused a moment, gave a pinch to her waist with her
+two hands, or raised these members--they were very plump and pretty--
+to the multifold braids of her hair, with a movement half caressing,
+half corrective.  An attentive observer might have fancied
+that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her face
+forgot its melancholy; but as soon as she neared the window again
+it began to proclaim that she was a very ill-pleased woman.
+And indeed, in what met her eyes there was little to be
+pleased with.  The window-panes were battered by the sleet;
+the head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed to be
+holding themselves askance to keep it out of their faces.
+A tall iron railing protected them from the street, and on
+the other side of the railing an assemblage of Bostonians were
+trampling about in the liquid snow.  Many of them were looking
+up and down; they appeared to be waiting for something.
+From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to the place
+where they stood,--such a vehicle as the lady at the window,
+in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions,
+had never seen before:  a huge, low omnibus, painted in
+brilliant colors, and decorated apparently with jangling bells,
+attached to a species of groove in the pavement,
+through which it was dragged, with a great deal of rumbling,
+bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small horses.
+When it reached a certain point the people in front of
+the grave-yard, of whom much the greater number were women,
+carrying satchels and parcels, projected themselves upon it
+in a compact body--a movement suggesting the scramble for places
+in a life-boat at sea--and were engulfed in its large interior.
+Then the life-boat--or the life-car, as the lady at the window
+of the hotel vaguely designated it--went bumping and jingling
+away upon its invisible wheels, with the helmsman (the man
+at the wheel) guiding its course incongruously from the prow.
+This phenomenon was repeated every three minutes, and the
+supply of eagerly-moving women in cloaks, bearing reticules
+and bundles, renewed itself in the most liberal manner.
+On the other side of the grave-yard was a row of small red
+brick houses, showing a series of homely, domestic-looking backs;
+at the end opposite the hotel a tall wooden church-spire,
+painted white, rose high into the vagueness of the snow-flakes.
+The lady at the window looked at it for some time; for reasons
+of her own she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
+She hated it, she despised it; it threw her into a state of
+irritation that was quite out of proportion to any sensible motive.
+She had never known herself to care so much about church-spires.
+
+She was not pretty; but even when it expressed perplexed
+irritation her face was most interesting and agreeable.
+Neither was she in her first youth; yet, though slender,
+with a great deal of extremely well-fashioned roundness of contour--
+a suggestion both of maturity and flexibility--she carried
+her three and thirty years as a light-wristed Hebe might have
+carried a brimming wine-cup. Her complexion was fatigued,
+as the French say; her mouth was large, her lips too full,
+her teeth uneven, her chin rather commonly modeled; she had
+a thick nose, and when she smiled--she was constantly smiling--
+the lines beside it rose too high, toward her eyes.
+But these eyes were charming:  gray in color, brilliant,
+quickly glancing, gently resting, full of intelligence.
+Her forehead was very low--it was her only handsome feature;
+and she had a great abundance of crisp dark hair, finely frizzled,
+which was always braided in a manner that suggested some
+Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman.  She had
+a large collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation;
+and they seemed to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect.
+A compliment had once been paid her, which, being repeated to her,
+gave her greater pleasure than anything she had ever heard.
+"A pretty woman?" some one had said.  "Why, her features
+are very bad."  "I don't know about her features," a very
+discerning observer had answered; "but she carries her head
+like a pretty woman."  You may imagine whether, after this,
+she carried her head less becomingly.
+
+She turned away from the window at last, pressing her hands to her eyes.
+"It 's too horrible!" she exclaimed.  "I shall go back--I shall go back!"
+And she flung herself into a chair before the fire.
+
+"Wait a little, dear child," said the young man softly,
+sketching away at his little scraps of paper.
+
+The lady put out her foot; it was very small, and there was an immense
+rosette on her slipper.  She fixed her eyes for a while on this ornament,
+and then she looked at the glowing bed of anthracite coal in the grate.
+"Did you ever see anything so hideous as that fire?" she demanded.
+"Did you ever see anything so--so affreux as--as everything?"
+She spoke English with perfect purity; but she brought out this
+French epithet in a manner that indicated that she was accustomed
+to using French epithets.
+
+"I think the fire is very pretty," said the young man,
+glancing at it a moment.  "Those little blue tongues,
+dancing on top of the crimson embers, are extremely picturesque.
+They are like a fire in an alchemist's laboratory."
+
+"You are too good-natured, my dear," his companion declared.
+
+The young man held out one of his drawings, with his head on one side.
+His tongue was gently moving along his under-lip. "Good-natured--yes.
+Too good-natured--no."
+
+"You are irritating," said the lady, looking at her slipper.
+
+He began to retouch his sketch.  "I think you mean simply
+that you are irritated."
+
+"Ah, for that, yes!" said his companion, with a little bitter laugh.
+"It 's the darkest day of my life--and you know what that means."
+
+"Wait till to-morrow," rejoined the young man.
+
+"Yes, we have made a great mistake.  If there is any doubt about it to-day,
+there certainly will be none to-morrow. Ce sera clair, au moins!"
+
+The young man was silent a few moments, driving his pencil.
+Then at last, "There are no such things as mistakes," he affirmed.
+
+"Very true--for those who are not clever enough to perceive them.
+Not to recognize one's mistakes--that would be happiness in life,"
+the lady went on, still looking at her pretty foot.
+
+"My dearest sister," said the young man, always intent upon his drawing,
+"it 's the first time you have told me I am not clever."
+
+"Well, by your own theory I can't call it a mistake,"
+answered his sister, pertinently enough.
+
+The young man gave a clear, fresh laugh.  "You, at least, are clever enough,
+dearest sister," he said.
+
+"I was not so when I proposed this."
+
+"Was it you who proposed it?" asked her brother.
+
+She turned her head and gave him a little stare.
+"Do you desire the credit of it?"
+
+"If you like, I will take the blame," he said, looking up with a smile.
+
+"Yes," she rejoined in a moment, "you make no difference in these things.
+You have no sense of property."
+
+The young man gave his joyous laugh again.  "If that means I have no property,
+you are right!"
+
+"Don't joke about your poverty," said his sister.
+"That is quite as vulgar as to boast about it."
+
+"My poverty!  I have just finished a drawing that will bring
+me fifty francs!"
+
+"Voyons," said the lady, putting out her hand.
+
+He added a touch or two, and then gave her his sketch.
+She looked at it, but she went on with her idea of a moment before.
+"If a woman were to ask you to marry her you would say,
+'Certainly, my dear, with pleasure!'  And you would marry her
+and be ridiculously happy.  Then at the end of three months you
+would say to her, 'You know that blissful day when I begged
+you to be mine!' "
+
+The young man had risen from the table, stretching his arms a little;
+he walked to the window.  "That is a description of a charming nature,"
+he said.
+
+"Oh, yes, you have a charming nature; I regard that as our capital.
+If I had not been convinced of that I should never have taken the risk
+of bringing you to this dreadful country."
+
+"This comical country, this delightful country!" exclaimed the young man,
+and he broke into the most animated laughter.
+
+"Is it those women scrambling into the omnibus?" asked his companion.
+"What do you suppose is the attraction?"
+
+"I suppose there is a very good-looking man inside,"
+said the young man.
+
+"In each of them?  They come along in hundreds, and the men
+in this country don't seem at all handsome.  As for the women--
+I have never seen so many at once since I left the convent."
+
+"The women are very pretty," her brother declared, "and the whole
+affair is very amusing.  I must make a sketch of it."
+And he came back to the table quickly, and picked up his utensils--
+a small sketching-board, a sheet of paper, and three or four crayons.
+He took his place at the window with these things, and stood
+there glancing out, plying his pencil with an air of easy skill.
+While he worked he wore a brilliant smile.  Brilliant is indeed
+the word at this moment for his strongly-lighted face.  He was eight
+and twenty years old; he had a short, slight, well-made figure.
+Though he bore a noticeable resemblance to his sister, he was
+a better favored person:  fair-haired, clear-faced, witty-looking,
+with a delicate finish of feature and an expression at once
+urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an eyebrow finely
+drawn and excessively arched--an eyebrow which, if ladies wrote
+sonnets to those of their lovers, might have been made the subject
+of such a piece of verse--and a light moustache that flourished
+upwards as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile.
+There was something in his physiognomy at once benevolent
+and picturesque.  But, as I have hinted, it was not at all serious.
+The young man's face was, in this respect, singular; it was not at
+all serious, and yet it inspired the liveliest confidence.
+
+"Be sure you put in plenty of snow," said his sister.
+"Bonte divine, what a climate!"
+
+"I shall leave the sketch all white, and I shall put in the little figures
+in black," the young man answered, laughing.  "And I shall call it--
+what is that line in Keats?--Mid-May's Eldest Child!"
+
+"I don't remember," said the lady, "that mamma ever told me
+it was like this."
+
+"Mamma never told you anything disagreeable.  And it 's not like this--
+every day.  You will see that to-morrow we shall have a splendid day."
+
+"Qu'en savez-vous? To-morrow I shall go away."
+
+"Where shall you go?"
+
+"Anywhere away from here.  Back to Silberstadt.
+I shall write to the Reigning Prince."
+
+The young man turned a little and looked at her, with his crayon poised.
+"My dear Eugenia," he murmured, "were you so happy at sea?"
+
+Eugenia got up; she still held in her hand the drawing her
+brother had given her.  It was a bold, expressive sketch
+of a group of miserable people on the deck of a steamer,
+clinging together and clutching at each other, while the vessel
+lurched downward, at a terrific angle, into the hollow of a wave.
+It was extremely clever, and full of a sort of tragi-comical power.
+Eugenia dropped her eyes upon it and made a sad grimace.
+"How can you draw such odious scenes?" she asked.  "I should
+like to throw it into the fire!"  And she tossed the paper away.
+Her brother watched, quietly, to see where it went.
+It fluttered down to the floor, where he let it lie.
+She came toward the window, pinching in her waist.
+"Why don't you reproach me--abuse me?" she asked.
+"I think I should feel better then.  Why don't you tell me
+that you hate me for bringing you here?"
+
+"Because you would not believe it.  I adore you, dear sister!
+I am delighted to be here, and I am charmed with the prospect."
+
+"I don't know what had taken possession of me.  I had lost my head,"
+Eugenia went on.
+
+The young man, on his side, went on plying his pencil.
+"It is evidently a most curious and interesting country.
+Here we are, and I mean to enjoy it."
+
+His companion turned away with an impatient step, but presently came back.
+"High spirits are doubtless an excellent thing," she said; "but you give
+one too much of them, and I can't see that they have done you any good."
+
+The young man stared, with lifted eyebrows, smiling; he tapped his handsome
+nose with his pencil.  "They have made me happy!"
+
+"That was the least they could do; they have made you nothing else.
+You have gone through life thanking fortune for such very small favors
+that she has never put herself to any trouble for you."
+
+"She must have put herself to a little, I think, to present
+me with so admirable a sister."
+
+"Be serious, Felix.  You forget that I am your elder."
+
+"With a sister, then, so elderly!" rejoined Felix, laughing.
+"I hoped we had left seriousness in Europe."
+
+"I fancy you will find it here.  Remember that you are nearly
+thirty years old, and that you are nothing but an obscure Bohemian--
+a penniless correspondent of an illustrated newspaper."
+
+"Obscure as much as you please, but not so much of a Bohemian as you think.
+And not at all penniless!  I have a hundred pounds in my pocket.
+I have an engagement to make fifty sketches, and I mean to paint
+the portraits of all our cousins, and of all their cousins, at a hundred
+dollars a head."
+
+"You are not ambitious," said Eugenia.
+
+"You are, dear Baroness," the young man replied.
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment, looking out at the sleet-darkened grave-yard
+and the bumping horse-cars. "Yes, I am ambitious," she said at last.  "And my
+ambition has brought me to this dreadful place!"  She glanced about her--
+the room had a certain vulgur nudity; the bed and the window were curtainless--
+and she gave a little passionate sigh.  "Poor old ambition!" she exclaimed.
+Then she flung herself down upon a sofa which stood near against the wall,
+and covered her face with her hands.
+
+Her brother went on with his drawing, rapidly and skillfully;
+after some moments he sat down beside her and showed her his sketch.
+"Now, don't you think that 's pretty good for an obscure Bohemian?"
+he asked.  "I have knocked off another fifty francs."
+
+Eugenia glanced at the little picture as he laid it on her lap.
+"Yes, it is very clever," she said.  And in a moment she added,
+"Do you suppose our cousins do that?"
+
+"Do what?"
+
+"Get into those things, and look like that."
+
+Felix meditated awhile.  "I really can't say.  It will be
+interesting to discover."
+
+"Oh, the rich people can't!" said the Baroness.
+
+"Are you very sure they are rich?" asked Felix, lightly.
+
+His sister slowly turned in her place, looking at him.  "Heavenly powers!"
+she murmured.  "You have a way of bringing out things!"
+
+"It will certainly be much pleasanter if they are rich," Felix declared.
+
+"Do you suppose if I had not known they were rich I would ever have come?"
+
+The young man met his sister's somewhat peremptory eye with his bright,
+contented glance.  "Yes, it certainly will be pleasanter," he repeated.
+
+"That is all I expect of them," said the Baroness.  "I don't count upon
+their being clever or friendly--at first--or elegant or interesting.
+But I assure you I insist upon their being rich."
+
+Felix leaned his head upon the back of the sofa and looked awhile
+at the oblong patch of sky to which the window served as frame.
+The snow was ceasing; it seemed to him that the sky had begun to brighten.
+"I count upon their being rich," he said at last, "and powerful, and clever,
+and friendly, and elegant, and interesting, and generally delightful!
+Tu vas voir."  And he bent forward and kissed his sister.  "Look there!"
+he went on.  "As a portent, even while I speak, the sky is turning
+the color of gold; the day is going to be splendid."
+
+And indeed, within five minutes the weather had changed.
+The sun broke out through the snow-clouds and jumped into
+the Baroness's room.  "Bonte divine," exclaimed this lady,
+"what a climate!"
+
+"We will go out and see the world," said Felix.
+
+And after a while they went out.  The air had grown warm
+as well as brilliant; the sunshine had dried the pavements.
+They walked about the streets at hazard, looking at the people
+and the houses, the shops and the vehicles, the blazing blue sky
+and the muddy crossings, the hurrying men and the slow-strolling
+maidens, the fresh red bricks and the bright green trees,
+the extraordinary mixture of smartness and shabbiness.
+From one hour to another the day had grown vernal; even in
+the bustling streets there was an odor of earth and blossom.
+Felix was immensely entertained.  He had called it a comical
+country, and he went about laughing at everything he saw.
+You would have said that American civilization expressed itself
+to his sense in a tissue of capital jokes.  The jokes were
+certainly excellent, and the young man's merriment was joyous
+and genial.  He possessed what is called the pictorial sense;
+and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred the same
+sort of attention that he would have given to the movements
+of a lively young person with a bright complexion.
+Such attention would have been demonstrative and complimentary;
+and in the present case Felix might have passed for an undispirited
+young exile revisiting the haunts of his childhood.  He kept
+looking at the violent blue of the sky, at the scintillating air,
+at the scattered and multiplied patches of color.
+
+"Comme c'est bariole, eh?" he said to his sister in that foreign
+tongue which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting
+occasionally to use.
+
+"Yes, it is bariole indeed," the Baroness answered.
+"I don't like the coloring; it hurts my eyes."
+
+"It shows how extremes meet," the young man rejoined.
+"Instead of coming to the West we seem to have gone to the East.
+The way the sky touches the house-tops is just like Cairo;
+and the red and blue sign-boards patched over the face
+of everything remind one of Mahometan decorations."
+
+"The young women are not Mahometan," said his companion.
+"They can't be said to hide their faces.  I never saw
+anything so bold."
+
+"Thank Heaven they don't hide their faces!" cried Felix.
+"Their faces are uncommonly pretty."
+
+"Yes, their faces are often very pretty," said the Baroness,
+who was a very clever woman.  She was too clever a woman not
+to be capable of a great deal of just and fine observation.
+She clung more closely than usual to her brother's arm;
+she was not exhilarated, as he was; she said very little,
+but she noted a great many things and made her reflections.
+She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed come
+to a strange country, to make her fortune.  Superficially, she was
+conscious of a good deal of irritation and displeasure;
+the Baroness was a very delicate and fastidious person.
+Of old, more than once, she had gone, for entertainment's sake
+and in brilliant company, to a fair in a provincial town.
+It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous fair--
+that the entertainment and the desagrements were very much the same.
+She found herself alternately smiling and shrinking;
+the show was very curious, but it was probable, from moment
+to moment, that one would be jostled.  The Baroness had never
+seen so many people walking about before; she had never been
+so mixed up with people she did not know.  But little by little
+she felt that this fair was a more serious undertaking.
+She went with her brother into a large public garden, which seemed
+very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no carriages.
+The afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid grass
+and the slender tree-boles were gilded by the level sunbeams--
+gilded as with gold that was fresh from the mine.  It was
+the hour at which ladies should come out for an airing and roll
+past a hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols askance.
+Here, however, Eugenia observed no indications of this custom,
+the absence of which was more anomalous as there was a charming
+avenue of remarkably graceful, arching elms in the most
+convenient contiguity to a large, cheerful street, in which,
+evidently, among the more prosperous members of the bourgeoisie,
+a great deal of pedestrianism went forward.  Our friends passed
+out into this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed a great
+many more pretty girls and called his sister's attention to them.
+This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for the Baroness
+had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.
+
+"I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that," said Felix.
+
+The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said.
+"They are very pretty," she said, "but they are mere little girls.
+Where are the women--the women of thirty?"
+
+"Of thirty-three, do you mean?" her brother was going to ask;
+for he understood often both what she said and what she did not say.
+But he only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset,
+while the Baroness, who had come to seek her fortune, reflected that
+it would certainly be well for her if the persons against whom she
+might need to measure herself should all be mere little girls.
+The sunset was superb; they stopped to look at it; Felix declared
+that he had never seen such a gorgeous mixture of colors.
+The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was perhaps
+the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood there
+she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part
+of various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom
+a distinguished, strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air,
+exclaiming upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street corner
+in the French tongue, could not be an object of indifference.
+Eugenia's spirits rose.  She surrendered herself to a certain
+tranquil gayety.  If she had come to seek her fortune,
+it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to find.
+There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western sky;
+there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze
+of the passers of a certain natural facility in things.
+
+"You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?" asked Felix.
+
+"Not to-morrow," said the Baroness.
+
+"Nor write to the Reigning Prince?"
+
+"I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over here."
+
+"He will not believe you," said the young man.  "I advise you
+to let him alone."
+
+Felix himself continued to be in high good humor.
+Brought up among ancient customs and in picturesque cities,
+he yet found plenty of local color in the little Puritan metropolis.
+That evening, after dinner, he told his sister that he should
+go forth early on the morrow to look up their cousins.
+
+"You are very impatient," said Eugenia.
+
+"What can be more natural," he asked, "after seeing all those
+pretty girls to-day? If one's cousins are of that pattern,
+the sooner one knows them the better."
+
+"Perhaps they are not," said Eugenia.  "We ought to have brought some letters--
+to some other people."
+
+"The other people would not be our kinsfolk."
+
+"Possibly they would be none the worse for that," the Baroness replied.
+
+Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted.
+"That was not what you said when you first proposed to me
+that we should come out here and fraternize with our relatives.
+You said that it was the prompting of natural affection;
+and when I suggested some reasons against it you declared
+that the voix du sang should go before everything."
+
+"You remember all that?" asked the Baroness.
+
+"Vividly!  I was greatly moved by it."
+
+She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the morning;
+she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother.  She apparently was
+going to say something, but she checked herself and resumed her walk.
+Then, in a few moments, she said something different, which had
+the effect of an explanation of the suppression of her earlier thought.
+"You will never be anything but a child, dear brother."
+
+"One would suppose that you, madam," answered Felix, laughing, "were a
+thousand years old."
+
+"I am--sometimes," said the Baroness.
+
+"I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival
+of a personage so extraordinary.  They will immediately come
+and pay you their respects."
+
+Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she
+stopped before her brother, laying her hand upon his arm.
+"They are not to come and see me," she said.  "You are not
+to allow that.  That is not the way I shall meet them first."
+And in answer to his interrogative glance she went on.
+"You will go and examine, and report.  You will come
+back and tell me who they are and what they are;
+their number, gender, their respective ages--all about them.
+Be sure you observe everything; be ready to describe
+to me the locality, the accessories--how shall I say it?--
+the mise en scene.  Then, at my own time, at my own hour,
+under circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them.
+I will present myself--I will appear before them!" said the Baroness,
+this time phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.
+
+"And what message am I to take to them?" asked Felix, who had a lively
+faith in the justness of his sister's arrangements.
+
+She looked at him a moment--at his expression of agreeable veracity;
+and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, "Say what you please.
+Tell my story in the way that seems to you most--natural."  And she bent
+her forehead for him to kiss.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had
+suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly
+leaped into summer.  This was an observation made by a young girl
+who came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled
+about in the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road.
+The flowering shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in
+the abundant light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms--
+they were magnificent trees--seemed to thicken by the hour;
+and the intensely habitual stillness offered a submissive
+medium to the sound of a distant church-bell. The young girl
+listened to the church-bell; but she was not dressed for church.
+She was bare-headed; she wore a white muslin waist, with an
+embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress was of colored muslin.
+She was a young lady of some two or three and twenty years of age,
+and though a young person of her sex walking bare-headed in a garden,
+of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in the nature of things,
+never be a displeasing object, you would not have pronounced this
+innocent Sabbath-breaker especially pretty.  She was tall and pale,
+thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and perfectly straight;
+her eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of seeming at once
+dull and restless--differing herein, as you see, fatally from the ideal
+"fine eyes," which we always imagine to be both brilliant and tranquil.
+The doors and windows of the large square house were all wide open,
+to admit the purifying sunshine, which lay in generous patches
+upon the floor of a wide, high, covered piazza adjusted to two
+sides of the mansion--a piazza on which several straw-bottomed
+rocking-chairs and half a dozen of those small cylindrical stools
+in green and blue porcelain, which suggest an affiliation between
+the residents and the Eastern trade, were symmetrically disposed.
+It was an ancient house--ancient in the sense of being eighty years old;
+it was built of wood, painted a clean, clear, faded gray, and adorned
+along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden pilasters, painted white.
+These pilasters appeared to support a kind of classic pediment, which was
+decorated in the middle by a large triple window in a boldly carved frame,
+and in each of its smaller angles by a glazed circular aperture.
+A large white door, furnished with a highly-polished brass knocker,
+presented itself to the rural-looking road, with which it was
+connected by a spacious pathway, paved with worn and cracked,
+but very clean, bricks.  Behind it there were meadows and orchards,
+a barn and a pond; and facing it, a short distance along the road,
+on the opposite side, stood a smaller house, painted white,
+with external shutters painted green, a little garden on one hand
+and an orchard on the other.  All this was shining in the morning air,
+through which the simple details of the picture addressed themselves
+to the eye as distinctly as the items of a "sum" in addition.
+
+A second young lady presently came out of the house, across the piazza,
+descended into the garden and approached the young girl of whom I
+have spoken.  This second young lady was also thin and pale; but she
+was older than the other; she was shorter; she had dark, smooth hair.
+Her eyes, unlike the other's, were quick and bright; but they were not at
+all restless.  She wore a straw bonnet with white ribbons, and a long,
+red, India scarf, which, on the front of her dress, reached to her feet.
+In her hand she carried a little key.
+
+"Gertrude," she said, "are you very sure you had better not go to church?"
+
+Gertrude looked at her a moment, plucked a small sprig
+from a lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away.
+"I am not very sure of anything!" she answered.
+
+The other young lady looked straight past her, at the distant pond,
+which lay shining between the long banks of fir-trees. Then she said
+in a very soft voice, "This is the key of the dining-room closet.
+I think you had better have it, if any one should want anything."
+
+"Who is there to want anything?"  Gertrude demanded.
+"I shall be all alone in the house."
+
+"Some one may come," said her companion.
+
+"Do you mean Mr. Brand?"
+
+"Yes, Gertrude.  He may like a piece of cake."
+
+"I don't like men that are always eating cake!"  Gertrude declared,
+giving a pull at the lilac-bush.
+
+Her companion glanced at her, and then looked down on the ground.
+"I think father expected you would come to church," she said.
+"What shall I say to him?"
+
+"Say I have a bad headache."
+
+"Would that be true?" asked the elder lady, looking straight
+at the pond again.
+
+"No, Charlotte," said the younger one simply.
+
+Charlotte transferred her quiet eyes to her companion's face.
+"I am afraid you are feeling restless."
+
+"I am feeling as I always feel," Gertrude replied, in the same tone.
+
+Charlotte turned away; but she stood there a moment.
+Presently she looked down at the front of her dress.
+"Does n't it seem to you, somehow, as if my scarf were
+too long?" she asked.
+
+Gertrude walked half round her, looking at the scarf.
+"I don't think you wear it right," she said.
+
+"How should I wear it, dear?"
+
+"I don't know; differently from that.  You should draw
+it differently over your shoulders, round your elbows;
+you should look differently behind."
+
+"How should I look?"  Charlotte inquired.
+
+"I don't think I can tell you," said Gertrude, plucking out
+the scarf a little behind.  "I could do it myself, but I don't
+think I can explain it."
+
+Charlotte, by a movement of her elbows, corrected the laxity that had come
+from her companion's touch.  "Well, some day you must do it for me.
+It does n't matter now.  Indeed, I don't think it matters," she added,
+"how one looks behind."
+
+"I should say it mattered more," said Gertrude.  "Then you don't
+know who may be observing you.  You are not on your guard.
+You can't try to look pretty."
+
+Charlotte received this declaration with extreme gravity.
+"I don't think one should ever try to look pretty,"
+she rejoined, earnestly.
+
+Her companion was silent.  Then she said, "Well, perhaps it
+'s not of much use."
+
+Charlotte looked at her a little, and then kissed her.
+"I hope you will be better when we come back."
+
+"My dear sister, I am very well!" said Gertrude.
+
+Charlotte went down the large brick walk to the garden gate;
+her companion strolled slowly toward the house.
+At the gate Charlotte met a young man, who was coming in--a tall,
+fair young man, wearing a high hat and a pair of thread gloves.
+He was handsome, but rather too stout.  He had a pleasant smile.
+"Oh, Mr. Brand!" exclaimed the young lady.
+
+"I came to see whether your sister was not going to church,"
+said the young man.
+
+"She says she is not going; but I am very glad you have come.
+I think if you were to talk to her a little".... And Charlotte
+lowered her voice.  "It seems as if she were restless."
+
+Mr. Brand smiled down on the young lady from his great height.
+"I shall be very glad to talk to her.  For that I should be willing
+to absent myself from almost any occasion of worship, however attractive."
+
+"Well, I suppose you know," said Charlotte, softly, as if
+positive acceptance of this proposition might be dangerous.
+"But I am afraid I shall be late."
+
+"I hope you will have a pleasant sermon," said the young man.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Gilman is always pleasant," Charlotte answered.
+And she went on her way.
+
+Mr. Brand went into the garden, where Gertrude, hearing the gate close
+behind him, turned and looked at him.  For a moment she watched him coming;
+then she turned away.  But almost immediately she corrected this movement,
+and stood still, facing him.  He took off his hat and wiped his forehead
+as he approached.  Then he put on his hat again and held out his hand.
+His hat being removed, you would have perceived that his forehead was
+very large and smooth, and his hair abundant but rather colorless.
+His nose was too large, and his mouth and eyes were too small; but for
+all this he was, as I have said, a young man of striking appearance.
+The expression of his little clean-colored blue eyes was irresistibly
+gentle and serious; he looked, as the phrase is, as good as gold.
+The young girl, standing in the garden path, glanced, as he came up,
+at his thread gloves.
+
+"I hoped you were going to church," he said.  "I wanted to walk with you."
+
+"I am very much obliged to you," Gertrude answered.
+"I am not going to church."
+
+She had shaken hands with him; he held her hand a moment.
+"Have you any special reason for not going?"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Brand," said the young girl.
+
+"May I ask what it is?"
+
+She looked at him smiling; and in her smile, as I
+have intimated, there was a certain dullness.  But mingled
+with this dullness was something sweet and suggestive.
+"Because the sky is so blue!" she said.
+
+He looked at the sky, which was magnificent, and then said,
+smiling too, "I have heard of young ladies staying at home
+for bad weather, but never for good.  Your sister,whom I met
+at the gate, tells me you are depressed," he added.
+
+"Depressed?  I am never depressed."
+
+"Oh, surely, sometimes," replied Mr. Brand, as if he thought this
+a regrettable account of one's self.
+
+"I am never depressed," Gertrude repeated.  "But I am sometimes wicked.
+When I am wicked I am in high spirits.  I was wicked just now to my sister."
+
+"What did you do to her?"
+
+"I said things that puzzled her--on purpose."
+
+"Why did you do that, Miss Gertrude?" asked the young man.
+
+She began to smile again.  "Because the sky is so blue!"
+
+"You say things that puzzle me," Mr. Brand declared.
+
+"I always know when I do it," proceeded Gertrude.  "But people puzzle me more,
+I think.  And they don't seem to know!"
+
+"This is very interesting," Mr. Brand observed, smiling.
+
+"You told me to tell you about my--my struggles," the young girl went on.
+
+"Let us talk about them.  I have so many things to say."
+
+Gertrude turned away a moment; and then, turning back,
+"You had better go to church," she said.
+
+"You know," the young man urged, "that I have always one thing to say."
+
+Gertrude looked at him a moment.  "Please don't say it now!"
+
+"We are all alone," he continued, taking off his hat;
+"all alone in this beautiful Sunday stillness."
+
+Gertrude looked around her, at the breaking buds, the shining distance,
+the blue sky to which she had referred as a pretext for her irregularities.
+"That 's the reason," she said, "why I don't want you to speak.
+Do me a favor; go to church."
+
+"May I speak when I come back?" asked Mr. Brand.
+
+"If you are still disposed," she answered.
+
+"I don't know whether you are wicked," he said, "but you
+are certainly puzzling."
+
+She had turned away; she raised her hands to her ears.
+He looked at her a moment, and then he slowly walked to church.
+
+She wandered for a while about the garden, vaguely and without purpose.
+The church-bell had stopped ringing; the stillness was complete.
+This young lady relished highly, on occasions, the sense of being alone--
+the absence of the whole family and the emptiness of the house.
+To-day, apparently, the servants had also gone to church;
+there was never a figure at the open windows; behind the house
+there was no stout negress in a red turban, lowering the bucket
+into the great shingle-hooded well.  And the front door of the big,
+unguarded home stood open, with the trustfulness of the golden age;
+or what is more to the purpose, with that of New England's silvery prime.
+Gertrude slowly passed through it, and went from one of the empty
+rooms to the other--large, clear-colored rooms, with white wainscots,
+ornamented with thin-legged mahogany furniture, and, on the walls,
+with old-fashioned engravings, chiefly of scriptural subjects,
+hung very high.  This agreeable sense of solitude, of having the house
+to herself, of which I have spoken, always excited Gertrude's imagination;
+she could not have told you why, and neither can her humble historian.
+It always seemed to her that she must do something particular--
+that she must honor the occasion; and while she roamed about,
+wondering what she could do, the occasion usually came to an end.
+To-day she wondered more than ever.  At last she took down a book;
+there was no library in the house, but there were books in all the rooms.
+None of them were forbidden books, and Gertrude had not stopped at
+home for the sake of a chance to climb to the inaccessible shelves.
+She possessed herself of a very obvious volume--one of the series
+of the Arabian Nights--and she brought it out into the portico
+and sat down with it in her lap.  There, for a quarter of an hour,
+she read the history of the loves of the Prince Camaralzaman
+and the Princess Badoura.  At last, looking up, she beheld,
+as it seemed to her, the Prince Camaralzaman standing before her.
+A beautiful young man was making her a very low bow--a magnificent bow,
+such as she had never seen before.  He appeared to have dropped
+from the clouds; he was wonderfully handsome; he smiled--
+smiled as if he were smiling on purpose.  Extreme surprise,
+for a moment, kept Gertrude sitting still; then she rose,
+without even keeping her finger in her book.  The young man,
+with his hat in his hand, still looked at her, smiling and smiling.
+It was very strange.
+
+"Will you kindly tell me," said the mysterious visitor, at last,
+"whether I have the honor of speaking to Miss Went-worth?"
+
+"My name is Gertrude Wentworth," murmured the young woman.
+
+"Then--then--I have the honor--the pleasure--of being your cousin."
+
+The young man had so much the character of an apparition that this
+announcement seemed to complete his unreality.  "What cousin?
+Who are you?" said Gertrude.
+
+He stepped back a few paces and looked up at the house;
+then glanced round him at the garden and the distant view.
+After this he burst out laughing.  "I see it must seem to you
+very strange," he said.  There was, after all, something substantial
+in his laughter.  Gertrude looked at him from head to foot.
+Yes, he was remarkably handsome; but his smile was almost a grimace.
+"It is very still," he went on, coming nearer again.
+And as she only looked at him, for reply, he added,
+"Are you all alone?"
+
+"Every one has gone to church," said Gertrude.
+
+"I was afraid of that!" the young man exclaimed.
+"But I hope you are not afraid of me."
+
+"You ought to tell me who you are," Gertrude answered.
+
+"I am afraid of you!" said the young man.  "I had a different plan.
+I expected the servant would take in my card, and that you would put
+your heads together, before admitting me, and make out my identity."
+
+Gertrude had been wondering with a quick intensity which brought its result;
+and the result seemed an answer--a wondrous, delightful answer--to her
+vague wish that something would befall her.  "I know--I know," she said.
+"You come from Europe."
+
+"We came two days ago.  You have heard of us, then--you believe in us?"
+
+"We have known, vaguely," said Gertrude, "that we had relations in France."
+
+"And have you ever wanted to see us?" asked the young man.
+
+Gertrude was silent a moment.  "I have wanted to see you."
+
+"I am glad, then, it is you I have found.  We wanted to see you,
+so we came."
+
+"On purpose?" asked Gertrude.
+
+The young man looked round him, smiling still.  "Well, yes;
+on purpose.  Does that sound as if we should bore you?" he added.
+"I don't think we shall--I really don't think we shall.
+We are rather fond of wandering, too; and we were glad
+of a pretext."
+
+"And you have just arrived?"
+
+"In Boston, two days ago.  At the inn I asked for Mr. Wentworth.
+He must be your father.  They found out for me where he lived;
+they seemed often to have heard of him.  I determined to come,
+without ceremony.  So, this lovely morning, they set my face
+in the right direction, and told me to walk straight before me,
+out of town.  I came on foot because I wanted to see the country.
+I walked and walked, and here I am!  It 's a good many miles."
+
+"It is seven miles and a half," said Gertrude, softly.
+Now that this handsome young man was proving himself a reality
+she found herself vaguely trembling; she was deeply excited.
+She had never in her life spoken to a foreigner, and she
+had often thought it would be delightful to do so.  Here was
+one who had suddenly been engendered by the Sabbath stillness
+for her private use; and such a brilliant, polite, smiling one!
+She found time and means to compose herself, however:  to remind
+herself that she must exercise a sort of official hospitality.
+"We are very--very glad to see you," she said.  "Won't you
+come into the house?"  And she moved toward the open door.
+
+"You are not afraid of me, then?" asked the young man again,
+with his light laugh.
+
+She wondered a moment, and then, "We are not afraid--here," she said.
+
+"Ah, comme vous devez avoir raison!" cried the young man,
+looking all round him, appreciatively.  It was the first time
+that Gertrude had heard so many words of French spoken.
+They gave her something of a sensation.  Her companion followed
+her, watching, with a certain excitement of his own, this tall,
+interesting-looking girl, dressed in her clear, crisp muslin.
+He paused in the hall, where there was a broad white staircase
+with a white balustrade.  "What a pleasant house!" he said.
+"It 's lighter inside than it is out."
+
+"It 's pleasanter here," said Gertrude, and she led the way
+into the parlor,--a high, clean, rather empty-looking room.
+Here they stood looking at each other,--the young man smiling
+more than ever; Gertrude, very serious, trying to smile.
+
+"I don't believe you know my name," he said.  "I am called Felix Young.
+Your father is my uncle.  My mother was his half sister, and older than he."
+
+"Yes," said Gertrude, "and she turned Roman Catholic and married in Europe."
+
+"I see you know," said the young man.  "She married and she died.
+Your father's family did n't like her husband.  They called him
+a foreigner; but he was not.  My poor father was born in Sicily,
+but his parents were American."
+
+"In Sicily?"  Gertrude murmured.
+
+"It is true," said Felix Young, "that they had spent their lives in Europe.
+But they were very patriotic.  And so are we."
+
+"And you are Sicilian," said Gertrude.
+
+"Sicilian, no!  Let 's see.  I was born at a little place--
+a dear little place--in France.  My sister was born at Vienna."
+
+"So you are French," said Gertrude.
+
+"Heaven forbid!" cried the young man.  Gertrude's eyes were
+fixed upon him almost insistently.  He began to laugh again.
+"I can easily be French, if that will please you."
+
+"You are a foreigner of some sort," said Gertrude.
+
+"Of some sort--yes; I suppose so.  But who can say of what sort?
+I don't think we have ever had occasion to settle the question.
+You know there are people like that.  About their country,
+their religion, their profession, they can't tell."
+
+Gertrude stood there gazing; she had not asked him to sit down.
+She had never heard of people like that; she wanted to hear.
+"Where do you live?" she asked.
+
+"They can't tell that, either!" said Felix.  "I am afraid
+you will think they are little better than vagabonds.
+I have lived anywhere--everywhere.  I really think I have lived in
+every city in Europe."  Gertrude gave a little long soft exhalation.
+It made the young man smile at her again; and his smile made
+her blush a little.  To take refuge from blushing she asked
+him if, after his long walk, he was not hungry or thirsty.
+Her hand was in her pocket; she was fumbling with the little
+key that her sister had given her.  "Ah, my dear young lady,"
+he said, clasping his hands a little, "if you could give me,
+in charity, a glass of wine!"
+
+Gertrude gave a smile and a little nod, and went quickly out of the room.
+Presently she came back with a very large decanter in one hand
+and a plate in the other, on which was placed a big, round cake
+with a frosted top.  Gertrude, in taking the cake from the closet,
+had had a moment of acute consciousness that it composed the refection
+of which her sister had thought that Mr. Brand would like to partake.
+Her kinsman from across the seas was looking at the pale,
+high-hung engravings.  When she came in he turned and smiled at her,
+as if they had been old friends meeting after a separation.
+"You wait upon me yourself?" he asked.  "I am served like the gods!"
+She had waited upon a great many people, but none of them had
+ever told her that.  The observation added a certain lightness
+to the step with which she went to a little table where there were
+some curious red glasses--glasses covered with little gold sprigs,
+which Charlotte used to dust every morning with her own hands.
+Gertrude thought the glasses very handsome, and it was a pleasure to her
+to know that the wine was good; it was her father's famous madeira.
+Felix Young thought it excellent; he wondered why he had been
+told that there was no wine in America.  She cut him an immense
+triangle out of the cake, and again she thought of Mr. Brand.
+Felix sat there, with his glass in one hand and his huge morsel
+of cake in the other--eating, drinking, smiling, talking.  "I am
+very hungry," he said.  "I am not at all tired; I am never tired.
+But I am very hungry."
+
+"You must stay to dinner," said Gertrude.  "At two o'clock. They
+will all have come back from church; you will see the others."
+
+"Who are the others?" asked the young man.  "Describe them all."
+
+"You will see for yourself.  It is you that must tell me;
+now, about your sister."
+
+"My sister is the Baroness Munster," said Felix.
+
+On hearing that his sister was a Baroness, Gertrude got up and
+walked about slowly, in front of him.  She was silent a moment.
+She was thinking of it.  "Why did n't she come, too?" she asked.
+
+"She did come; she is in Boston, at the hotel."
+
+"We will go and see her," said Gertrude, looking at him.
+
+"She begs you will not!" the young man replied.
+"She sends you her love; she sent me to announce her.
+She will come and pay her respects to your father."
+
+Gertrude felt herself trembling again.  A Baroness Munster,
+who sent a brilliant young man to "announce" her; who was coming,
+as the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon, to pay her "respects"
+to quiet Mr. Wentworth--such a personage presented herself
+to Gertrude's vision with a most effective unexpectedness.
+For a moment she hardly knew what to say.  "When will she come?"
+she asked at last.
+
+"As soon as you will allow her--to-morrow. She is very impatient,"
+answered Felix, who wished to be agreeable.
+
+"To-morrow, yes," said Gertrude.  She wished to ask more about her;
+but she hardly knew what could be predicated of a Baroness Munster.
+"Is she--is she--married?"
+
+Felix had finished his cake and wine; he got up, fixing upon the young
+girl his bright, expressive eyes.  "She is married to a German prince--
+Prince Adolf, of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. He is not the reigning prince;
+he is a younger brother."
+
+Gertrude gazed at her informant; her lips were slightly parted.
+"Is she a--a Princess?" she asked at last.
+
+"Oh, no," said the young man; "her position is rather a singular one.
+It 's a morganatic marriage."
+
+"Morganatic?"  These were new names and new words to poor Gertrude.
+
+"That 's what they call a marriage, you know, contracted between
+a scion of a ruling house and--and a common mortal.
+They made Eugenia a Baroness, poor woman; but that was all
+they could do.  Now they want to dissolve the marriage.
+Prince Adolf, between ourselves, is a ninny; but his brother,
+who is a clever man, has plans for him.  Eugenia, naturally enough,
+makes difficulties; not, however, that I think she cares much--
+she 's a very clever woman; I 'm sure you 'll like her--
+but she wants to bother them.  Just now everything is en l'air."
+
+The cheerful, off-hand tone in which her visitor related this
+darkly romantic tale seemed to Gertrude very strange; but it
+seemed also to convey a certain flattery to herself, a recognition
+of her wisdom and dignity.  She felt a dozen impressions stirring
+within her, and presently the one that was uppermost found words.
+"They want to dissolve her marriage?" she asked.
+
+"So it appears."
+
+"And against her will?"
+
+"Against her right."
+
+"She must be very unhappy!" said Gertrude.
+
+Her visitor looked at her, smiling; he raised his hand to the back
+of his head and held it there a moment.  "So she says," he answered.
+"That 's her story.  She told me to tell it you."
+
+"Tell me more," said Gertrude.
+
+"No, I will leave that to her; she does it better."
+
+Gertrude gave her little excited sigh again.  "Well, if she is unhappy,"
+she said, "I am glad she has come to us."
+
+She had been so interested that she failed to notice the sound of a footstep
+in the portico; and yet it was a footstep that she always recognized.
+She heard it in the hall, and then she looked out of the window.
+They were all coming back from church--her father, her sister and brother,
+and their cousins, who always came to dinner on Sunday.  Mr. Brand had come
+in first; he was in advance of the others, because, apparently, he was
+still disposed to say what she had not wished him to say an hour before.
+He came into the parlor, looking for Gertrude.  He had two little
+books in his hand.  On seeing Gertrude's companion he slowly stopped,
+looking at him.
+
+"Is this a cousin?" asked Felix.
+
+Then Gertrude saw that she must introduce him; but her ears, and,
+by sympathy, her lips, were full of all that he had been telling her.
+"This is the Prince," she said, "the Prince of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein!"
+
+Felix burst out laughing, and Mr. Brand stood staring, while the others,
+who had passed into the house, appeared behind him in the open door-way.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+That evening at dinner Felix Young gave his sister,
+the Baroness Munster, an account of his impressions.
+She saw that he had come back in the highest possible spirits;
+but this fact, to her own mind, was not a reason for rejoicing.
+She had but a limited confidence in her brother's judgment;
+his capacity for taking rose-colored views was such as to
+vulgarize one of the prettiest of tints.  Still, she supposed
+he could be trusted to give her the mere facts; and she invited
+him with some eagerness to communicate them.  "I suppose,
+at least, they did n't turn you out from the door;" she said.
+"You have been away some ten hours."
+
+"Turn me from the door!"  Felix exclaimed.  "They took me to their hearts;
+they killed the fatted calf."
+
+"I know what you want to say:  they are a collection of angels."
+
+"Exactly," said Felix.  "They are a collection of angels--simply."
+
+"C'est bien vague," remarked the Baroness.  "What are they like?"
+
+"Like nothing you ever saw."
+
+"I am sure I am much obliged; but that is hardly more definite.
+Seriously, they were glad to see you?"
+
+"Enchanted.  It has been the proudest day of my life.  Never, never have
+I been so lionized!  I assure you, I was cock of the walk.
+My dear sister," said the young man, "nous n'avons qu'a nous tenir;
+we shall be great swells!"
+
+Madame Munster looked at him, and her eye exhibited a slight
+responsive spark.  She touched her lips to a glass of wine,
+and then she said, "Describe them.  Give me a picture."
+
+Felix drained his own glass.  "Well, it 's in the country,
+among the meadows and woods; a wild sort of place,
+and yet not far from here.  Only, such a road, my dear!
+Imagine one of the Alpine glaciers reproduced in mud.
+But you will not spend much time on it, for they want you
+to come and stay, once for all."
+
+"Ah," said the Baroness, "they want me to come and stay,
+once for all?  Bon."
+
+"It 's intensely rural, tremendously natural; and all overhung with this
+strange white light, this far-away blue sky.  There 's a big wooden house--
+a kind of three-story bungalow; it looks like a magnified N; auuremberg toy.
+There was a gentleman there that made a speech to me about it and called it
+a 'venerable mansion;' but it looks as if it had been built last night."
+
+"Is it handsome--is it elegant?" asked the Baroness.
+
+Felix looked at her a moment, smiling.  "It 's very clean!  No splendors,
+no gilding, no troops of servants; rather straight-backed chairs.
+But you might eat off the floors, and you can sit down on the stairs."
+
+"That must be a privilege.  And the inhabitants are straight-backed
+too, of course."
+
+"My dear sister," said Felix, "the inhabitants are charming."
+
+"In what style?"
+
+"In a style of their own.  How shall I describe it?  It 's primitive;
+it 's patriarchal; it 's the ton of the golden age."
+
+"And have they nothing golden but their ton?  Are there no
+symptoms of wealth?"
+
+"I should say there was wealth without symptoms.  A plain,
+homely way of life:  nothing for show, and very little for--
+what shall I call it?--for the senses:  but a great aisance,
+and a lot of money, out of sight, that comes forward very quietly
+for subscriptions to institutions, for repairing tenements,
+for paying doctor's bills; perhaps even for portioning daughters."
+
+"And the daughters?"  Madame Munster demanded.  "How many are there?"
+
+"There are two, Charlotte and Gertrude."
+
+"Are they pretty?"
+
+"One of them," said Felix.
+
+"Which is that?"
+
+The young man was silent, looking at his sister.
+"Charlotte," he said at last.
+
+She looked at him in return.  "I see.  You are in love with Gertrude.
+They must be Puritans to their finger-tips; anything but gay!"
+
+"No, they are not gay," Felix admitted.  "They are sober;
+they are even severe.  They are of a pensive cast; they take
+things hard.  I think there is something the matter with them;
+they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation.
+It 's not the epicurean temperament.  My uncle, Mr. Wentworth,
+is a tremendously high-toned old fellow; he looks as if
+he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but by freezing.
+But we shall cheer them up; we shall do them good.
+They will take a good deal of stirring up; but they are
+wonderfully kind and gentle.  And they are appreciative.
+They think one clever; they think one remarkable!"
+
+"That is very fine, so far as it goes," said the Baroness.
+"But are we to be shut up to these three people, Mr. Wentworth
+and the two young women--what did you say their names were--
+Deborah and Hephzibah?"
+
+"Oh, no; there is another little girl, a cousin of theirs,
+a very pretty creature; a thorough little American.
+And then there is the son of the house."
+
+"Good!" said the Baroness.  "We are coming to the gentlemen.
+What of the son of the house?"
+
+"I am afraid he gets tipsy."
+
+"He, then, has the epicurean temperament!  How old is he?"
+
+"He is a boy of twenty; a pretty young fellow, but I am afraid he has
+vulgar tastes.  And then there is Mr. Brand--a very tall young man,
+a sort of lay-priest. They seem to think a good deal of him,
+but I don't exactly make him out."
+
+"And is there nothing," asked the Baroness, "between these extremes--
+this mysterious ecclesiastic and that intemperate youth?"
+
+"Oh, yes, there is Mr. Acton.  I think," said the young man,
+with a nod at his sister, "that you will like Mr. Acton."
+
+"Remember that I am very fastidious," said the Baroness.
+"Has he very good manners?"
+
+"He will have them with you.  He is a man of the world;
+he has been to China."
+
+Madame Munster gave a little laugh.  "A man of the Chinese world!
+He must be very interesting."
+
+"I have an idea that he brought home a fortune," said Felix.
+
+"That is always interesting.  Is he young, good-looking, clever?"
+
+"He is less than forty; he has a baldish head; he says witty things.
+I rather think," added the young man, "that he will admire
+the Baroness Munster."
+
+"It is very possible," said this lady.  Her brother never knew
+how she would take things; but shortly afterwards she declared
+that he had made a very pretty description and that on the morrow
+she would go and see for herself.
+
+They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche--a vehicle as to
+which the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that
+was asked for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat.
+(At Silberstadt Madame Munster had had liveries of yellow
+and crimson.) They drove into the country, and the Baroness,
+leaning far back and swaying her lace-fringed parasol,
+looked to right and to left and surveyed the way-side objects.
+After a while she pronounced them "affreux."  Her brother
+remarked that it was apparently a country in which the foreground
+was inferior to the plans recules:  and the Baroness
+rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground.
+Felix had fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should
+bring his sister; it was four o'clock in the afternoon.
+The large, clean-faced house wore, to his eyes,
+as the barouche drove up to it, a very friendly aspect;
+the high, slender elms made lengthening shadows in front of it.
+The Baroness descended; her American kinsfolk were stationed
+in the portico.  Felix waved his hat to them, and a tall,
+lean gentleman, with a high forehead and a clean shaven face,
+came forward toward the garden gate.  Charlotte Wentworth
+walked at his side.  Gertrude came behind, more slowly.
+Both of these young ladies wore rustling silk dresses.
+Felix ushered his sister into the gate.  "Be very gracious,"
+he said to her.  But he saw the admonition was superfluous.
+Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as only Eugenia could be.
+Felix knew no keener pleasure than to be able to admire his
+sister unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent,
+it was not inveterate.  When she desired to please she was to him,
+as to every one else, the most charming woman in the world.
+Then he forgot that she was ever anything else; that she was
+sometimes hard and perverse; that he was occasionally afraid
+of her.  Now, as she took his arm to pass into the garden,
+he felt that she desired, that she proposed, to please,
+and this situation made him very happy.  Eugenia would please.
+
+The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave.
+But it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning.
+Mr. Wentworth's manner was pregnant, on the contrary,
+with a sense of grand responsibility, of the solemnity
+of the occasion, of its being difficult to show sufficient
+deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy.
+Felix had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor;
+and now he perceived that there was something almost
+cadaverous in his uncle's high-featured white face.
+But so clever were this young man's quick sympathies
+and perceptions that he already learned that in these
+semi-mortuary manifestations there was no cause for alarm.
+His light imagination had gained a glimpse of Mr. Wentworth's
+spiritual mechanism, and taught him that, the old man being
+infinitely conscientious, the special operation of conscience
+within him announced itself by several of the indications
+of physical faintness.
+
+The Baroness took her uncle's hand, and stood looking
+at him with her ugly face and her beautiful smile.
+"Have I done right to come?" she asked.
+
+"Very right, very right," said Mr. Wentworth, solemnly.  He had
+arranged in his mind a little speech; but now it quite faded away.
+He felt almost frightened.  He had never been looked at in just
+that way--with just that fixed, intense smile--by any woman;
+and it perplexed and weighed upon him, now, that the woman
+who was smiling so and who had instantly given him a vivid
+sense of her possessing other unprecedented attributes,
+was his own niece, the child of his own father's daughter.
+The idea that his niece should be a German Baroness,
+married "morganatically" to a Prince, had already given him much
+to think about.  Was it right, was it just, was it acceptable?
+He always slept badly, and the night before he had lain awake
+much more even than usual, asking himself these questions.
+The strange word "morganatic" was constantly in his ears;
+it reminded him of a certain Mrs. Morgan whom he had
+once known and who had been a bold, unpleasant woman.
+He had a feeling that it was his duty, so long as the Baroness
+looked at him, smiling in that way, to meet her glance with his
+own scrupulously adjusted, consciously frigid organs of vision;
+but on this occasion he failed to perform his duty to the last.
+He looked away toward his daughters.  "We are very glad to
+see you," he had said.  "Allow me to introduce my daughters--
+Miss Charlotte Wentworth, Miss Gertrude Wentworth."
+
+The Baroness thought she had never seen people less demonstrative.
+But Charlotte kissed her and took her hand, looking at her
+sweetly and solemnly.  Gertrude seemed to her almost funereal,
+though Gertrude might have found a source of gayety in the fact
+that Felix, with his magnificent smile, had been talking to her;
+he had greeted her as a very old friend.  When she kissed
+the Baroness she had tears in her eyes.  Madame Munster took each
+of these young women by the hand, and looked at them all over.
+Charlotte thought her very strange-looking and singularly dressed;
+she could not have said whether it was well or ill.
+She was glad, at any rate, that they had put on their silk gowns--
+especially Gertrude.  "My cousins are very pretty,"
+said the Baroness, turning her eyes from one to the other.
+"Your daughters are very handsome, sir."
+
+Charlotte blushed quickly; she had never yet heard her
+personal appearance alluded to in a loud, expressive voice.
+Gertrude looked away--not at Felix; she was extremely pleased.
+It was not the compliment that pleased her; she did not believe it;
+she thought herself very plain.  She could hardly have told
+you the source of her satisfaction; it came from something
+in the way the Baroness spoke, and it was not diminished--
+it was rather deepened, oddly enough--by the young girl's disbelief.
+Mr. Wentworth was silent; and then he asked, formally, "Won't you
+come into the house?"
+
+"These are not all; you have some other children," said the Baroness.
+
+"I have a son," Mr. Wentworth answered.
+
+"And why does n't he come to meet me?"  Eugenia cried.
+"I am afraid he is not so charming as his sisters."
+
+"I don't know; I will see about it," the old man declared.
+
+"He is rather afraid of ladies," Charlotte said, softly.
+
+"He is very handsome," said Gertrude, as loud as she could.
+
+"We will go in and find him.  We will draw him out of his cachette."
+And the Baroness took Mr. Wentworth's arm, who was not aware that
+he had offered it to her, and who, as they walked toward the house,
+wondered whether he ought to have offered it and whether it was proper
+for her to take it if it had not been offered.  "I want to know you well,"
+said the Baroness, interrupting these meditations, "and I want you
+to know me."
+
+"It seems natural that we should know each other," Mr. Wentworth rejoined.
+"We are near relatives."
+
+"Ah, there comes a moment in life when one reverts, irresistibly,
+to one's natural ties--to one's natural affections.
+You must have found that!" said Eugenia.
+
+Mr. Wentworth had been told the day before by Felix that Eugenia was very
+clever, very brilliant, and the information had held him in some suspense.
+This was the cleverness, he supposed; the brilliancy was beginning.
+"Yes, the natural affections are very strong," he murmured.
+
+"In some people," the Baroness declared.  "Not in all."
+Charlotte was walking beside her; she took hold of her hand again,
+smiling always.  "And you, cousine, where did you get that
+enchanting complexion?" she went on; "such lilies and roses?"
+The roses in poor Charlotte's countenance began speedily
+to predominate over the lilies, and she quickened her step
+and reached the portico.  "This is the country of complexions,"
+the Baroness continued, addressing herself to Mr. Wentworth.
+"I am convinced they are more delicate.  There are very good ones
+in England--in Holland; but they are very apt to be coarse.
+There is too much red."
+
+"I think you will find," said Mr. Wentworth, "that this
+country is superior in many respects to those you mention.
+I have been to England and Holland."
+
+"Ah, you have been to Europe?" cried the Baroness.  "Why did n't you
+come and see me?  But it 's better, after all, this way," she said.
+They were entering the house; she paused and looked round her.
+"I see you have arranged your house--your beautiful house--in the--
+in the Dutch taste!"
+
+"The house is very old," remarked Mr. Wentworth.
+"General Washington once spent a week here."
+
+"Oh, I have heard of Washington," cried the Baroness.
+"My father used to tell me of him."
+
+Mr. Wentworth was silent a moment, and then, "I found he was very well known
+in Europe," he said.
+
+Felix had lingered in the garden with Gertrude; he was standing
+before her and smiling, as he had done the day before.
+What had happened the day before seemed to her a kind of dream.
+He had been there and he had changed everything; the others had
+seen him, they had talked with him; but that he should come again,
+that he should be part of the future, part of her small, familiar,
+much-meditating life--this needed, afresh, the evidence of her senses.
+The evidence had come to her senses now; and her senses seemed
+to rejoice in it.  "What do you think of Eugenia?"  Felix asked.
+"Is n't she charming?"
+
+"She is very brilliant," said Gertrude.  "But I can't tell yet.
+She seems to me like a singer singing an air.  You can't tell till
+the song is done."
+
+"Ah, the song will never be done!" exclaimed the young man, laughing.
+"Don't you think her handsome?"
+
+Gertrude had been disappointed in the beauty of the
+Baroness Munster; she had expected her, for mysterious reasons,
+to resemble a very pretty portrait of the Empress Josephine,
+of which there hung an engraving in one of the parlors,
+and which the younger Miss Wentworth had always greatly admired.
+But the Baroness was not at all like that--not at all.
+Though different, however, she was very wonderful, and Gertrude
+felt herself most suggestively corrected.  It was strange,
+nevertheless, that Felix should speak in that positive way
+about his sister's beauty.  "I think I shall think her handsome,"
+Gertrude said.  "It must be very interesting to know her.
+I don't feel as if I ever could."
+
+"Ah, you will know her well; you will become great friends,"
+Felix declared, as if this were the easiest thing in the world.
+
+"She is very graceful," said Gertrude, looking after the Baroness,
+suspended to her father's arm.  It was a pleasure to her to say
+that any one was graceful.
+
+Felix had been looking about him.  "And your little cousin,
+of yesterday," he said, "who was so wonderfully pretty--
+what has become of her?"
+
+"She is in the parlor," Gertrude answered.  "Yes, she is very pretty."
+She felt as if it were her duty to take him straight into the house,
+to where he might be near her cousin.  But after hesitating a moment she
+lingered still.  "I did n't believe you would come back," she said.
+
+"Not come back!" cried Felix, laughing.  "You did n't know, then,
+the impression made upon this susceptible heart of mine."
+
+She wondered whether he meant the impression her cousin Lizzie had made.
+"Well," she said, "I did n't think we should ever see you again.  "
+
+"And pray what did you think would become of me?"
+
+"I don't know.  I thought you would melt away."
+
+"That 's a compliment to my solidity!  I melt very often,"
+said Felix, "but there is always something left of me."
+
+"I came and waited for you by the door, because the others did,"
+Gertrude went on.  "But if you had never appeared I should not
+have been surprised."
+
+"I hope," declared Felix, looking at her, "that you would
+have been disappointed."
+
+       She looked at him a little, and shook her head. "No--no!"
+
+"Ah, par exemple!" cried the young man.  "You deserve that I
+should never leave you."
+
+Going into the parlor they found Mr. Wentworth performing introductions.
+A young man was standing before the Baroness, blushing a good deal,
+laughing a little, and shifting his weight from one foot to the other--
+a slim, mild-faced young man, with neatly-arranged features,
+like those of Mr. Wentworth.  Two other gentlemen, behind him,
+had risen from their seats, and a little apart, near one of the windows,
+stood a remarkably pretty young girl.  The young girl was knitting
+a stocking; but, while her fingers quickly moved, she looked with wide,
+brilliant eyes at the Baroness.
+
+"And what is your son's name?" said Eugenia, smiling at the young man.
+
+"My name is Clifford Wentworth, ma'am," he said in a tremulous voice.
+
+"Why did n't you come out to meet me, Mr. Clifford Wentworth?"
+the Baroness demanded, with her beautiful smile.
+
+"I did n't think you would want me," said the young man,
+slowly sidling about.
+
+"One always wants a beau cousin,--if one has one!  But if you
+are very nice to me in future I won't remember it against you."
+And Madame M; auunster transferred her smile to the other persons present.
+It rested first upon the candid countenance and long-skirted figure
+of Mr. Brand, whose eyes were intently fixed upon Mr. Wentworth,
+as if to beg him not to prolong an anomalous situation.  Mr. Wentworth
+pronounced his name.  Eugenia gave him a very charming glance,
+and then looked at the other gentleman.
+
+This latter personage was a man of rather less than the usual stature
+and the usual weight, with a quick, observant, agreeable dark eye,
+a small quantity of thin dark hair, and a small mustache.
+He had been standing with his hands in his pockets; and when Eugenia
+looked at him he took them out.  But he did not, like Mr. Brand,
+look evasively and urgently at their host.  He met Eugenia's eyes;
+he appeared to appreciate the privilege of meeting them.
+Madame Munster instantly felt that he was, intrinsically, the most
+important person present.  She was not unconscious that this
+impression was in some degree manifested in the little sympathetic
+nod with which she acknowledged Mr. Wentworth's announcement,
+"My cousin, Mr. Acton!"
+
+"Your cousin--not mine?" said the Baroness.
+
+"It only depends upon you," Mr. Acton declared, laughing.
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment, and noticed that he had
+very white teeth.  "Let it depend upon your behavior," she said.
+"I think I had better wait.  I have cousins enough.  Unless I can
+also claim relationship," she added, "with that charming young lady,"
+and she pointed to the young girl at the window.
+
+"That 's my sister," said Mr. Acton.  And Gertrude Wentworth
+put her arm round the young girl and led her forward.
+It was not, apparently, that she needed much leading.
+She came toward the Baroness with a light, quick step,
+and with perfect self-possession, rolling her stocking round
+its needles.  She had dark blue eyes and dark brown hair;
+she was wonderfully pretty.
+
+Eugenia kissed her, as she had kissed the other young women,
+and then held her off a little, looking at her.  "Now this is quite
+another type," she said; she pronounced the word in the French manner.
+"This is a different outline, my uncle, a different character,
+from that of your own daughters.  This, Felix," she went on,
+"is very much more what we have always thought of as the American type."
+
+The young girl, during this exposition, was smiling askance at every
+one in turn, and at Felix out of turn.  "I find only one type here!"
+cried Felix, laughing.  "The type adorable!"
+
+This sally was received in perfect silence, but Felix, who learned all
+things quickly, had already learned that the silences frequently observed
+among his new acquaintances were not necessarily restrictive or resentful.
+It was, as one might say, the silence of expectation, of modesty.
+They were all standing round his sister, as if they were expecting
+her to acquit herself of the exhibition of some peculiar faculty,
+some brilliant talent.  Their attitude seemed to imply that she was a kind
+of conversational mountebank, attired, intellectually, in gauze and spangles.
+This attitude gave a certain ironical force to Madame Munster's next words.
+"Now this is your circle," she said to her uncle.  "This is your salon.
+These are your regular habitu; aaes, eh?  I am so glad to see
+you all together."
+
+"Oh," said Mr. Wentworth, "they are always dropping in and out.
+You must do the same."
+
+"Father," interposed Charlotte Wentworth, "they must do something more."
+And she turned her sweet, serious face, that seemed at once timid and placid,
+upon their interesting visitor.  "What is your name?" she asked.
+
+"Eugenia-Camilla-Dolores," said the Baroness, smiling.
+"But you need n't say all that."
+
+"I will say Eugenia, if you will let me.  You must come and stay with us."
+
+The Baroness laid her hand upon Charlotte's arm very tenderly;
+but she reserved herself.  She was wondering whether
+it would be possible to "stay" with these people.
+"It would be very charming--very charming," she said;
+and her eyes wandered over the company, over the room.
+She wished to gain time before committing herself.
+Her glance fell upon young Mr. Brand, who stood there,
+with his arms folded and his hand on his chin, looking at her.
+"The gentleman, I suppose, is a sort of ecclesiastic,"
+she said to Mr. Wentworth, lowering her voice a little.
+
+"He is a minister," answered Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"A Protestant?" asked Eugenia.
+
+"I am a Unitarian, madam," replied Mr. Brand, impressively.
+
+"Ah, I see," said Eugenia.  "Something new."  She had never heard
+of this form of worship.
+
+Mr. Acton began to laugh, and Gertrude looked anxiously at Mr. Brand.
+
+"You have come very far," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"Very far--very far," the Baroness replied, with a graceful shake of her head--
+a shake that might have meant many different things.
+
+"That 's a reason why you ought to settle down with us,"
+said Mr. Wentworth, with that dryness of utterance which,
+as Eugenia was too intelligent not to feel, took nothing
+from the delicacy of his meaning.
+
+She looked at him, and for an instant, in his cold, still face,
+she seemed to see a far-away likeness to the vaguely remembered
+image of her mother.  Eugenia was a woman of sudden emotions,
+and now, unexpectedly, she felt one rising in her heart.
+She kept looking round the circle; she knew that there
+was admiration in all the eyes that were fixed upon her.
+She smiled at them all.
+
+"I came to look--to try--to ask," she said.  "It seems
+to me I have done well.  I am very tired; I want to rest."
+There were tears in her eyes.  The luminous interior,
+the gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious life--the sense
+of these things pressed upon her with an overmastering force,
+and she felt herself yielding to one of the most genuine emotions
+she had ever known.  "I should like to stay here," she said.
+"Pray take me in."
+
+Though she was smiling, there were tears in her voice as well as in her eyes.
+"My dear niece," said Mr. Wentworth, softly.  And Charlotte put out her
+arms and drew the Baroness toward her; while Robert Acton turned away,
+with his hands stealing into his pockets.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A few days after the Baroness Munster had presented herself
+to her American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up
+her abode in that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth's
+own dwelling of which mention has already been made.
+It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that
+Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage at her service;
+the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy, diffused through
+the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which the two
+foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal
+of earnestness and subtlety.  The discussion went forward,
+as I say, in the family circle; but that circle on the evening
+following Madame M; auunster's return to town, as on many
+other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty sister.
+If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed
+to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated
+as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this
+tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment.
+This was not Mr. Wentworth's way of treating any human occurrence.
+The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness
+of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme
+of usual obligations required a readjustment of that sense
+of responsibility which constituted its principal furniture.
+To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the light
+of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual
+exercise with which Felix Young's American cousins were
+almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed
+to be largely pursued in any section of human society.
+The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction,
+but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction.
+It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more
+recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte,
+nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great
+promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it
+as an extension of enjoyment.  This function was ultimately
+assumed by Gertrude Wentworth, who was a peculiar girl,
+but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been
+exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext
+in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners.
+Gertrude, however, had to struggle with a great accumulation
+of obstructions, both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say,
+and of the objective, order; and indeed it is no small part
+of the purpose of this little history to set forth her struggle.
+What seemed paramount in this abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth's
+sympathies and those of his daughters was an extension
+of the field of possible mistakes; and the doctrine, as it
+may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of mistakes was
+one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth family.
+
+"I don't believe she wants to come and stay in this house,"
+said Gertrude; Madame Munster, from this time forward,
+receiving no other designation than the personal pronoun.
+Charlotte and Gertrude acquired considerable facility in
+addressing her, directly, as "Eugenia;" but in speaking of her
+to each other they rarely called her anything but "she."
+
+"Does n't she think it good enough for her?" cried little Lizzie Acton,
+who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in strictness,
+no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer than such as she
+herself invariably furnished in a small, innocently-satirical laugh.
+
+"She certainly expressed a willingness to come," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"That was only politeness," Gertrude rejoined.
+
+"Yes, she is very polite--very polite," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"She is too polite," his son declared, in a softly growling
+tone which was habitual to him, but which was an indication
+of nothing worse than a vaguely humorous intention.
+"It is very embarrassing."
+
+"That is more than can be said of you, sir," said Lizzie Acton,
+with her little laugh.
+
+"Well, I don't mean to encourage her," Clifford went on.
+
+"I 'm sure I don't care if you do!" cried Lizzie.
+
+"She will not think of you, Clifford," said Gertrude, gravely.
+
+"I hope not!"  Clifford exclaimed.
+
+"She will think of Robert," Gertrude continued, in the same tone.
+
+Robert Acton began to blush; but there was no occasion for it,
+for every one was looking at Gertrude--every one, at least,
+save Lizzie, who, with her pretty head on one side,
+contemplated her brother.
+
+"Why do you attribute motives, Gertrude?" asked Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"I don't attribute motives, father," said Gertrude.
+"I only say she will think of Robert; and she will!"
+
+"Gertrude judges by herself!"  Acton exclaimed, laughing.
+"Don't you, Gertrude?  Of course the Baroness will think of me.
+She will think of me from morning till night."
+
+"She will be very comfortable here," said Charlotte, with something
+of a housewife's pride.  "She can have the large northeast room.
+And the French bedstead," Charlotte added, with a constant sense
+of the lady's foreignness.
+
+"She will not like it," said Gertrude; "not even if you pin little
+tidies all over the chairs."
+
+"Why not, dear?" asked Charlotte, perceiving a touch of irony here,
+but not resenting it.
+
+Gertrude had left her chair; she was walking about the room;
+her stiff silk dress, which she had put on in honor of the Baroness,
+made a sound upon the carpet.  "I don't know," she replied.
+"She will want something more--more private."
+
+"If she wants to be private she can stay in her room,"
+Lizzie Acton remarked.
+
+Gertrude paused in her walk, looking at her.  "That would not be pleasant,"
+she answered.  "She wants privacy and pleasure together."
+
+Robert Acton began to laugh again.  "My dear cousin, what a picture!"
+
+Charlotte had fixed her serious eyes upon her sister;
+she wondered whence she had suddenly derived these strange notions.
+Mr. Wentworth also observed his younger daughter.
+
+"I don't know what her manner of life may have been," he said;
+"but she certainly never can have enjoyed a more refined
+and salubrious home."
+
+Gertrude stood there looking at them all.  "She is the wife
+of a Prince," she said.
+
+"We are all princes here," said Mr. Wentworth; "and I don't know
+of any palace in this neighborhood that is to let."
+
+"Cousin William," Robert Acton interposed, "do you want to do
+something handsome?  Make them a present, for three months,
+of the little house over the way."
+
+"You are very generous with other people's things!" cried his sister.
+
+"Robert is very generous with his own things," Mr. Wentworth
+observed dispassionately, and looking, in cold meditation,
+at his kinsman.
+
+"Gertrude," Lizzie went on, "I had an idea you were so fond
+of your new cousin."
+
+"Which new cousin?" asked Gertrude.
+
+"I don't mean the Baroness!" the young girl rejoined, with her laugh.
+"I thought you expected to see so much of him."
+
+"Of Felix?  I hope to see a great deal of him," said Gertrude, simply.
+
+"Then why do you want to keep him out of the house?"
+
+Gertrude looked at Lizzie Acton, and then looked away.
+
+"Should you want me to live in the house with you, Lizzie?" asked Clifford.
+
+"I hope you never will.  I hate you!"  Such was this young lady's reply.
+
+"Father," said Gertrude, stopping before Mr. Wentworth and smiling,
+with a smile the sweeter, as her smile always was, for its rarity;
+"do let them live in the little house over the way.
+It will be lovely!"
+
+Robert Acton had been watching her.  "Gertrude is right,"
+he said.  "Gertrude is the cleverest girl in the world.
+If I might take the liberty, I should strongly recommend
+their living there."
+
+"There is nothing there so pretty as the northeast room," Charlotte urged.
+
+"She will make it pretty.  Leave her alone!"  Acton exclaimed.
+
+Gertrude, at his compliment, had blushed and looked at him:
+it was as if some one less familiar had complimented her.
+"I am sure she will make it pretty.  It will be very interesting.
+It will be a place to go to.  It will be a foreign house."
+
+"Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?"  Mr. Wentworth inquired.
+"Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house--in this quiet place?"
+
+"You speak," said Acton, laughing, "as if it were a question
+of the poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table."
+
+"It would be too lovely!"  Gertrude declared again, laying her hand
+on the back of her father's chair.
+
+"That she should open a gaming-table?" Charlotte asked,
+with great gravity.
+
+Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, "Yes, Charlotte,"
+she said, simply.
+
+"Gertrude is growing pert," Clifford Wentworth observed, with his humorous
+young growl.  "That comes of associating with foreigners."
+
+Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him;
+he drew her gently forward.  "You must be careful," he said.
+"You must keep watch.  Indeed, we must all be careful.
+This is a great change; we are to be exposed to peculiar influences.
+I don't say they are bad.  I don't judge them in advance.
+But they may perhaps make it necessary that we should exercise a great
+deal of wisdom and self-control. It will be a different tone."
+
+Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father's speech;
+then she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it.
+"I want to see how they will live.  I am sure they will have
+different hours.  She will do all kinds of little things differently.
+When we go over there it will be like going to Europe.
+She will have a boudoir.  She will invite us to dinner--very late.
+She will breakfast in her room.  "
+
+Charlotte gazed at her sister again.  Gertrude's imagination seemed
+to her to be fairly running riot.  She had always known that Gertrude
+had a great deal of imagination--she had been very proud of it.
+But at the same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous
+and irresponsible faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment,
+it seemed to threaten to make her sister a strange person
+who should come in suddenly, as from a journey, talking of
+the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things she had observed.
+Charlotte's imagination took no journeys whatever;
+she kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture
+of this receptacle--a thimble, a little box of peppermint,
+and a morsel of court-plaster. "I don't believe she would
+have any dinner--or any breakfast," said Miss Wentworth.
+"I don't believe she knows how to do anything herself.
+I should have to get her ever so many servants, and she would
+n't like them."
+
+"She has a maid," said Gertrude; "a French maid.
+She mentioned her."
+
+"I wonder if the maid has a little fluted cap and red slippers,"
+said Lizzie Acton.  "There was a French maid in that play
+that Robert took me to see.  She had pink stockings;
+she was very wicked."
+
+"She was a soubrette," Gertrude announced, who had never
+seen a play in her life.  "They call that a soubrette.
+It will be a great chance to learn French."  Charlotte gave
+a little soft, helpless groan.  She had a vision of a wicked,
+theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red shoes, and speaking,
+with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible tongue,
+flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean house.
+"That is one reason in favor of their coming here," Gertrude went on.
+"But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix.
+I mean to begin--the next time."
+
+Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave
+her his earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again.
+"I want you to make me a promise, Gertrude," he said.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, smiling.
+
+"Not to get excited.  Not to allow these--these occurrences
+to be an occasion for excitement."
+
+She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head.
+"I don't think I can promise that, father.  I am excited already."
+
+Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent,
+as if in recognition of something audacious and portentous.
+
+"I think they had better go to the other house," said Charlotte, quietly.
+
+"I shall keep them in the other house," Mr. Wentworth subjoined,
+more pregnantly.
+
+Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton.
+Her cousin Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this way
+instead of saying things.  Her glance on this occasion, however, struck him
+as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance than usual,
+inviting him to observe, among other things, the inefficiency of her
+father's design--if design it was--for diminishing, in the interest
+of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their foreign relatives.
+But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth upon his liberality.
+"That 's a very nice thing to do," he said, "giving them the little house.
+You will have treated them handsomely, and, whatever happens, you will
+be glad of it."  Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew he was liberal.
+It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it recorded;
+and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with
+which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him.
+
+"A three days' visit at most, over there, is all I should
+have found possible," Madame Munster remarked to her brother,
+after they had taken possession of the little white house.
+"It would have been too intime--decidedly too intime.
+Breakfast, dinner, and tea en famille--it would have been the end
+of the world if I could have reached the third day."  And she made
+the same observation to her maid Augustine, an intelligent person,
+who enjoyed a liberal share of her confidence.  Felix declared that
+he would willingly spend his life in the bosom of the Wentworth family;
+that they were the kindest, simplest, most amiable people in
+the world, and that he had taken a prodigious fancy to them all.
+The Baroness quite agreed with him that they were simple and kind;
+they were thoroughly nice people, and she liked them extremely.
+The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible to be more of a lady
+than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little village air.
+"But as for thinking them the best company in the world,"
+said the Baroness, "that is another thing; and as for wishing to live
+porte ; aga porte with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself
+back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep
+in a dormitory."  And yet the Baroness was in high good humor;
+she had been very much pleased.  With her lively perception
+and her refined imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything
+that was characteristic, anything that was good of its kind.
+The Wentworth household seemed to her very perfect in its kind--
+wonderfully peaceful and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored
+freshness that had all the quietude and benevolence of what she
+deemed to be Quakerism, and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree
+of material abundance for which, in certain matters of detail,
+one might have looked in vain at the frugal little court of
+Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. She perceived immediately that her
+American relatives thought and talked very little about money;
+and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia's imagination.
+She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or Gertrude should ask
+their father for a very considerable sum he would at once place it
+in their hands; and this made a still greater impression.  The greatest
+impression of all, perhaps, was made by another rapid induction.
+The Baroness had an immediate conviction that Robert Acton would put
+his hand into his pocket every day in the week if that rattle-pated
+little sister of his should bid him.  The men in this country,
+said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging.  Her declaration that she
+was looking for rest and retirement had been by no means wholly untrue;
+nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue.  It is but fair
+to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly true.
+She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature;
+it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk.
+She said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull;
+but there can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact
+that she thought she should not mind its being a little dull.
+It seemed to her, when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage
+she looked out over the soundless fields, the stony pastures,
+the clear-faced ponds, the rugged little orchards, that she had
+never been in the midst of so peculiarly intense a stillness;
+it was almost a delicate sensual pleasure.  It was all very good,
+very innocent and safe, and out of it something good must come.
+Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith in her mistress's wisdom
+and far-sightedness, was a great deal perplexed and depressed.
+She was always ready to take her cue when she understood it; but she
+liked to understand it, and on this occasion comprehension failed.
+What, indeed, was the Baroness doing dans cette galere? what fish
+did she expect to land out of these very stagnant waters?
+The game was evidently a deep one.  Augustine could trust her;
+but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the
+physiognomy of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person,
+who had nothing in common with Gertrude Wentworth's conception
+of a soubrette, by the most ironical scowl that had ever rested upon
+the unpretending tokens of the peace and plenty of the Wentworths.
+Fortunately, Augustine could quench skepticism in action.
+She quite agreed with her mistress--or rather she quite out-stripped
+her mistress--in thinking that the little white house was pitifully bare.
+"Il faudra," said Augustine, "lui faire un peu de toilette.
+" And she began to hang up portieres in the doorways; to place
+wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected situations;
+to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and the backs
+of chairs.  The Baroness had brought with her to the New World
+a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two
+Miss Wentworths, when they came over to see her, were somewhat
+bewildered by the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe.
+There were India shawls suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlor door,
+and curious fabrics, corresponding to Gertrude's metaphysical
+vision of an opera-cloak, tumbled about in the sitting-places.
+There were pink silk blinds in the windows, by which the room
+was strangely bedimmed; and along the chimney-piece was disposed
+a remarkable band of velvet, covered with coarse, dirty-looking lace.
+"I have been making myself a little comfortable," said the Baroness,
+much to the confusion of Charlotte, who had been on the point of
+proposing to come and help her put her superfluous draperies away.
+But what Charlotte mistook for an almost culpably delayed subsidence
+Gertrude very presently perceived to be the most ingenious,
+the most interesting, the most romantic intention.
+"What is life, indeed, without curtains?" she secretly asked herself;
+and she appeared to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence
+singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.
+
+Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about anything--
+least of all about the conditions of enjoyment.  His faculty of
+enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said
+of it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow.
+His sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change
+were in themselves a delight to him.  As they had come to him
+with a great deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable
+than appeared.  Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate.
+It was not a restless, apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race
+with the tyranny of fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put
+Adversity off her guard, dodging and evading her with the easy,
+natural motion of a wind-shifted flower.  Felix extracted
+entertainment from all things, and all his faculties--his imagination,
+his intelligence, his affections, his senses--had a hand in the game.
+It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had been very well treated; there was
+something absolutely touching in that combination of paternal liberality
+and social considerateness which marked Mr. Wentworth's deportment.
+It was most uncommonly kind of him, for instance, to have given them
+a house.  Felix was positively amused at having a house of his own;
+for the little white cottage among the apple-trees--the chalet,
+as Madame Munster always called it--was much more sensibly his own than
+any domiciliary quatrieme, looking upon a court, with the rent overdue.
+Felix had spent a good deal of his life in looking into courts,
+with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows resting upon the ledge
+of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a cigarette rising
+into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away and the vibration
+of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible.  He had never
+known anything so infinitely rural as these New England fields;
+and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses.
+He had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at
+the risk of making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare
+that he found an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine
+every day at his uncle's. The charm was irresistible, however,
+because his fancy flung a rosy light over this homely privilege.
+He appreciated highly the fare that was set before him.
+There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance about it which made
+him think that people must have lived so in the mythological era,
+when they spread their tables upon the grass, replenished them
+from cornucopias, and had no particular need of kitchen stoves.
+But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found a family--
+sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might
+call by their first names.  He had never known anything
+more charming than the attention they paid to what he said.
+It was like a large sheet of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper,
+all ready to be washed over with effective splashes of water-color.
+He had never had any cousins, and he had never before found
+himself in contact so unrestricted with young unmarried ladies.
+He was extremely fond of the society of ladies, and it was
+new to him that it might be enjoyed in just this manner.
+At first he hardly knew what to make of his state of mind.
+It seemed to him that he was in love, indiscriminately, with three
+girls at once.  He saw that Lizzie Acton was more brilliantly pretty
+than Charlotte and Gertrude; but this was scarcely a superiority.
+His pleasure came from something they had in common--a part of
+which was, indeed, that physical delicacy which seemed to make it proper
+that they should always dress in thin materials and clear colors.
+But they were delicate in other ways, and it was most agreeable to him
+to feel that these latter delicacies were appreciable by contact,
+as it were.  He had known, fortunately, many virtuous gentlewomen,
+but it now appeared to him that in his relations with them (especially when
+they were unmarried) he had been looking at pictures under glass.
+He perceived at present what a nuisance the glass had been--
+how it perverted and interfered, how it caught the reflection of other
+objects and kept you walking from side to side.  He had no need
+to ask himself whether Charlotte and Gertrude, and Lizzie Acton,
+were in the right light; they were always in the right light.
+He liked everything about them:  he was, for instance, not at all above
+liking the fact that they had very slender feet and high insteps.
+He liked their pretty noses; he liked their surprised eyes
+and their hesitating, not at all positive way of speaking;
+he liked so much knowing that he was perfectly at liberty to be alone
+for hours, anywhere, with either of them; that preference for one
+to the other, as a companion of solitude, remained a minor affair.
+Charlotte Wentworth's sweetly severe features were as agreeable
+as Lizzie Acton's wonderfully expressive blue eyes; and Gertrude's
+air of being always ready to walk about and listen was as charming
+as anything else, especially as she walked very gracefully.
+After a while Felix began to distinguish; but even then he would
+often wish, suddenly, that they were not all so sad.  Even Lizzie Acton,
+in spite of her fine little chatter and laughter, appeared sad.
+Even Clifford Wentworth, who had extreme youth in his favor,
+and kept a buggy with enormous wheels and a little sorrel mare
+with the prettiest legs in the world--even this fortunate lad
+was apt to have an averted, uncomfortable glance, and to edge away
+from you at times, in the manner of a person with a bad conscience.
+The only person in the circle with no sense of oppression of any
+kind was, to Felix's perception, Robert Acton.
+
+It might perhaps have been feared that after the completion
+of those graceful domiciliary embellishments which have
+been mentioned Madame M; auunster would have found herself
+confronted with alarming possibilities of ennui.  But as yet
+she had not taken the alarm.  The Baroness was a restless soul,
+and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said,
+into any situation that lay before her.  Up to a certain point
+her restlessness might be counted upon to entertain her.
+She was always expecting something to happen, and, until it
+was disappointed, expectancy itself was a delicate pleasure.
+What the Baroness expected just now it would take some
+ingenuity to set forth; it is enough that while she looked
+about her she found something to occupy her imagination.
+She assured herself that she was enchanted with her new relatives;
+she professed to herself that, like her brother, she felt it a sacred
+satisfaction to have found a family.  It is certain that she
+enjoyed to the utmost the gentleness of her kinsfolk's deference.
+She had, first and last, received a great deal of admiration,
+and her experience of well-turned compliments was very considerable;
+but she knew that she had never been so real a power, never counted
+for so much, as now when, for the first time, the standard
+of comparison of her little circle was a prey to vagueness.
+The sense, indeed, that the good people about her had,
+as regards her remarkable self, no standard of comparison
+at all gave her a feeling of almost illimitable power.
+It was true, as she said to herself, that if for this reason
+they would be able to discover nothing against her, so they
+would perhaps neglect to perceive some of her superior points;
+but she always wound up her reflections by declaring that she
+would take care of that.
+
+Charlotte and Gertrude were in some perplexity between their desire
+to show all proper attention to Madame Munster and their fear of
+being importunate.  The little house in the orchard had hitherto been
+occupied during the summer months by intimate friends of the family,
+or by poor relations who found in Mr. Wentworth a landlord attentive
+to repairs and oblivious of quarter-day. Under these circumstances
+the open door of the small house and that of the large one, facing each
+other across their homely gardens, levied no tax upon hourly visits.
+But the Misses Wentworth received an impression that Eugenia was no
+friend to the primitive custom of "dropping in;" she evidently had
+no idea of living without a door-keeper. "One goes into your house
+as into an inn--except that there are no servants rushing forward,"
+she said to Charlotte.  And she added that that was very charming.
+Gertrude explained to her sister that she meant just the reverse;
+she did n't like it at all.  Charlotte inquired why she should tell
+an untruth, and Gertrude answered that there was probably some very good
+reason for it which they should discover when they knew her better.
+"There can surely be no good reason for telling an untruth," said Charlotte.
+"I hope she does not think so."
+
+They had of course desired, from the first, to do everything
+in the way of helping her to arrange herself.  It had seemed
+to Charlotte that there would be a great many things to talk about;
+but the Baroness was apparently inclined to talk about nothing.
+
+"Write her a note, asking her leave to come and see her.
+I think that is what she will like," said Gertrude.
+
+"Why should I give her the trouble of answering me?"  Charlotte asked.
+"She will have to write a note and send it over."
+
+"I don't think she will take any trouble," said Gertrude, profoundly.
+
+"What then will she do?"
+
+"That is what I am curious to see," said Gertrude, leaving her sister
+with an impression that her curiosity was morbid.
+
+They went to see the Baroness without preliminary correspondence;
+and in the little salon which she had already created, with its
+becoming light and its festoons, they found Robert Acton.
+
+Eugenia was intensely gracious, but she accused them of neglecting
+her cruelly.  "You see Mr. Acton has had to take pity upon me," she said.
+"My brother goes off sketching, for
+
+hours; I can never depend upon him.  So I was to send Mr. Acton to beg
+you to come and give me the benefit of your wisdom."
+
+Gertrude looked at her sister.  She wanted to say, "That is what she would
+have done."  Charlotte said that they hoped the Baroness would always come
+and dine with them; it would give them so much pleasure; and, in that case,
+she would spare herself the trouble of having a cook.
+
+"Ah, but I must have a cook!" cried the Baroness.  "An old
+negress in a yellow turban.  I have set my heart upon that.
+I want to look out of my window and see her sitting there
+on the grass, against the background of those crooked,
+dusky little apple-trees, pulling the husks off a lapful
+of Indian corn.  That will be local color, you know.
+There is n't much of it here--you don't mind my saying that,
+do you?--so one must make the most of what one can get.
+I shall be most happy to dine with you whenever you
+will let me; but I want to be able to ask you sometimes.
+And I want to be able to ask Mr. Acton," added the Baroness.
+
+"You must come and ask me at home," said Acton.
+"You must come and see me; you must dine with me first.
+I want to show you my place; I want to introduce you to my mother."
+He called again upon Madame M; auunster, two days later.
+He was constantly at the other house; he used to walk across
+the fields from his own place, and he appeared to have fewer
+scruples than his cousins with regard to dropping in.
+On this occasion he found that Mr. Brand had come to pay his
+respects to the charming stranger; but after Acton's arrival
+the young theologian said nothing.  He sat in his chair
+with his two hands clasped, fixing upon his hostess a grave,
+fascinated stare.  The Baroness talked to Robert Acton, but,
+as she talked, she turned and smiled at Mr. Brand, who never
+took his eyes off her.  The two men walked away together;
+they were going to Mr. Wentworth's. Mr. Brand still said nothing;
+but after they had passed into Mr. Wentworth's garden he stopped
+and looked back for some time at the little white house.
+Then, looking at his companion, with his head bent a little to one
+side and his eyes somewhat contracted, "Now I suppose that 's
+what is called conversation," he said; "real conversation."
+
+"It 's what I call a very clever woman," said Acton, laughing.
+
+"It is most interesting," Mr. Brand continued.  "I only wish
+she would speak French; it would seem more in keeping.
+It must be quite the style that we have heard about, that we
+have read about--the style of conversation of Madame de Stael,
+of Madame Recamier."
+
+Acton also looked at Madame Munster's residence among its
+hollyhocks and apple-trees. "What I should like to know,"
+he said, smiling, "is just what has brought Madame Recamier
+to live in that place!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Mr. Wentworth, with his cane and his gloves in his hand,
+went every afternoon to call upon his niece.  A couple of hours
+later she came over to the great house to tea.  She had let
+the proposal that she should regularly dine there fall to the ground;
+she was in the enjoyment of whatever satisfaction was to be
+derived from the spectacle of an old negress in a crimson turban
+shelling peas under the apple-trees. Charlotte, who had provided
+the ancient negress, thought it must be a strange household,
+Eugenia having told her that Augustine managed everything,
+the ancient negress included--Augustine who was naturally devoid
+of all acquaintance with the expurgatory English tongue.
+By far the most immoral sentiment which I shall have occasion
+to attribute to Charlotte Wentworth was a certain emotion of
+disappointment at finding that, in spite of these irregular conditions,
+the domestic arrangements at the small house were apparently not--
+from Eugenia's peculiar point of view--strikingly offensive.
+The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner.
+The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast;
+and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza,
+or wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their ears full
+of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are supposed
+to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer nights,
+seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies
+an incomparable resonance.
+
+Mr. Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call
+upon her, was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece.
+It taxed his imagination to believe that she was really his
+half-sister's child.  His sister was a figure of his early years;
+she had been only twenty when she went abroad, never to return,
+making in foreign parts a willful and undesirable marriage.
+His aunt, Mrs. Whiteside, who had taken her to Europe for the benefit
+of the tour, gave, on her return, so lamentable an account
+of Mr. Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong girl had united
+her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family feeling--
+especially in the case of the half-brothers. Catherine
+had done nothing subsequently to propitiate her family;
+she had not even written to them in a way that indicated a lucid
+appreciation of their suspended sympathy; so that it had become
+a tradition in Boston circles that the highest charity,
+as regards this young lady, was to think it well to forget her,
+and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which
+her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants.
+Over these young people--a vague report of their existence had
+come to his ears--Mr. Wentworth had not, in the course of years,
+allowed his imagination to hover.  It had plenty of occupation
+nearer home, and though he had many cares upon his conscience
+the idea that he had been an unnatural uncle was, very properly,
+never among the number.  Now that his nephew and niece had come
+before him, he perceived that they were the fruit of influences
+and circumstances very different from those under which his own
+familiar progeny had reached a vaguely-qualified maturity.
+He felt no provocation to say that these influences had been
+exerted for evil; but he was sometimes afraid that he should not
+be able to like his distinguished, delicate, lady-like niece.
+He was paralyzed and bewildered by her foreignness.
+She spoke, somehow, a different language.  There was something
+strange in her words.  He had a feeling that another man,
+in his place, would accommodate himself to her tone; would ask
+her questions and joke with her, reply to those pleasantries of her
+own which sometimes seemed startling as addressed to an uncle.
+But Mr. Wentworth could not do these things.  He could not even
+bring himself to attempt to measure her position in the world.
+She was the wife of a foreign nobleman who desired to
+repudiate her.  This had a singular sound, but the old man
+felt himself destitute of the materials for a judgment.
+It seemed to him that he ought to find them in his own experience,
+as a man of the world and an almost public character;
+but they were not there, and he was ashamed to confess to himself--
+much more to reveal to Eugenia by interrogations possibly
+too innocent--the unfurnished condition of this repository.
+
+It appeared to him that he could get much nearer, as he would have said,
+to his nephew; though he was not sure that Felix was altogether safe.
+He was so bright and handsome and talkative that it was impossible
+not to think well of him; and yet it seemed as if there were something
+almost impudent, almost vicious--or as if there ought to be--
+in a young man being at once so joyous and so positive.  It was to be
+observed that while Felix was not at all a serious young man there
+was somehow more of him--he had more weight and volume and resonance--
+than a number of young men who were distinctly serious.  While Mr. Wentworth
+meditated upon this anomaly his nephew was admiring him unrestrictedly.
+He thought him a most delicate, generous, high-toned old gentleman,
+with a very handsome head, of the ascetic type, which he promised himself
+the profit of sketching.  Felix was far from having made a secret
+of the fact that he wielded the paint-brush, and it was not his own
+fault if it failed to be generally understood that he was prepared
+to execute the most striking likenesses on the most reasonable terms.
+"He is an artist--my cousin is an artist," said Gertrude;
+and she offered this information to every one who would receive it.
+She offered it to herself, as it were, by way of admonition and reminder;
+she repeated to herself at odd moments, in lonely places,
+that Felix was invested with this sacred character.  Gertrude had
+never seen an artist before; she had only read about such people.
+They seemed to her a romantic and mysterious class, whose life was made
+up of those agreeable accidents that never happened to other persons.
+And it merely quickened her meditations on this point that Felix
+should declare, as he repeatedly did, that he was really not an artist.
+"I have never gone into the thing seriously," he said.  "I have never studied;
+I have had no training.  I do a little of everything, and nothing well.
+I am only an amateur."
+
+It pleased Gertrude even more to think that he was an amateur
+than to think that he was an artist; the former word, to her fancy,
+had an even subtler connotation.  She knew, however, that it
+was a word to use more soberly.  Mr. Wentworth used it freely;
+for though he had not been exactly familiar with it, he found it
+convenient as a help toward classifying Felix, who, as a young man
+extremely clever and active and apparently respectable and yet not
+engaged in any recognized business, was an importunate anomaly.
+Of course the Baroness and her brother--she was always spoken of first--
+were a welcome topic of conversation between Mr. Wentworth and his
+daughters and their occasional visitors.
+
+"And the young man, your nephew, what is his profession?"
+asked an old gentleman--Mr. Broderip, of Salem--who had been
+Mr. Wentworth's classmate at Harvard College in the year 1809,
+and who came into his office in Devonshire Street.
+(Mr. Wentworth, in his later years, used to go but three times
+a week to his office, where he had a large amount of highly
+confidential trust-business to transact.)
+
+"Well, he 's an amateur," said Felix's uncle, with folded hands,
+and with a certain satisfaction in being able to say it.
+And Mr. Broderip had gone back to Salem with a feeling
+that this was probably a "European" expression for a broker
+or a grain exporter.
+
+"I should like to do your head, sir," said Felix to his uncle one evening,
+before them all--Mr. Brand and Robert Acton being also present.
+"I think I should make a very fine thing of it.  It 's an interesting head;
+it 's very mediaeval."
+
+Mr. Wentworth looked grave; he felt awkwardly, as if all the company had come
+in and found him standing before the looking-glass. "The Lord made it,"
+he said.  "I don't think it is for man to make it over again."
+
+"Certainly the Lord made it," replied Felix, laughing, "and he
+made it very well.  But life has been touching up the work.
+It is a very interesting type of head.  It 's delightfully
+wasted and emaciated.  The complexion is wonderfully bleached."
+And Felix looked round at the circle, as if to call their attention
+to these interesting points.  Mr. Wentworth grew visibly paler.
+"I should like to do you as an old prelate, an old cardinal,
+or the prior of an order."
+
+"A prelate, a cardinal?" murmured Mr. Wentworth.
+"Do you refer to the Roman Catholic priesthood?"
+
+"I mean an old ecclesiastic who should have led a very pure, abstinent life.
+Now I take it that has been the case with you, sir; one sees it in your face,"
+Felix proceeded.  "You have been very--a very moderate.  Don't you think
+one always sees that in a man's face?"
+
+"You see more in a man's face than I should think of looking for,"
+said Mr. Wentworth coldly.
+
+The Baroness rattled her fan, and gave her brilliant laugh.
+"It is a risk to look so close!" she exclaimed.
+"My uncle has some peccadilloes on his conscience."
+Mr. Wentworth looked at her, painfully at a loss; and in so
+far as the signs of a pure and abstinent life were visible
+in his face they were then probably peculiarly manifest.
+"You are a beau vieillard, dear uncle," said Madame M;
+auunster, smiling with her foreign eyes.
+
+"I think you are paying me a compliment," said the old man.
+
+"Surely, I am not the first woman that ever did so!"
+cried the Baroness.
+
+"I think you are," said Mr. Wentworth gravely.  And turning to Felix
+he added, in the same tone, "Please don't take my likeness.
+My children have my daguerreotype.  That is quite satisfactory."
+
+"I won't promise," said Felix, "not to work your head into something!"
+
+Mr. Wentworth looked at him and then at all the others;
+then he got up and slowly walked away.
+
+"Felix," said Gertrude, in the silence that followed, "I wish you
+would paint my portrait."
+
+Charlotte wondered whether Gertrude was right in wishing this;
+and she looked at Mr. Brand as the most legitimate way of ascertaining.
+Whatever Gertrude did or said, Charlotte always looked at Mr. Brand.
+It was a standing pretext for looking at Mr. Brand--always,
+as Charlotte thought, in the interest of Gertrude's welfare.
+It is true that she felt a tremulous interest in Gertrude being right;
+for Charlotte, in her small, still way, was an heroic sister.
+
+"We should be glad to have your portrait, Miss Gertrude,"
+said Mr. Brand.
+
+"I should be delighted to paint so charming a model," Felix declared.
+
+"Do you think you are so lovely, my dear?" asked Lizzie Acton,
+with her little inoffensive pertness, biting off a knot
+in her knitting.
+
+"It is not because I think I am beautiful," said Gertrude,
+looking all round.  "I don't think I am beautiful, at all."
+She spoke with a sort of conscious deliberateness; and it seemed very
+strange to Charlotte to hear her discussing this question so publicly.
+"It is because I think it would be amusing to sit and be painted.
+I have always thought that."
+
+"I am sorry you have not had better things to think about, my daughter,"
+said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"You are very beautiful, cousin Gertrude," Felix declared.
+
+"That 's a compliment," said Gertrude.  "I put all the compliments
+I receive into a little money-jug that has a slit in the side.
+I shake them up and down, and they rattle.  There are not many yet--
+only two or three."
+
+"No, it 's not a compliment," Felix rejoined.  "See; I am careful not to give
+it the form of a compliment.  I did n't think you were beautiful at first.
+But you have come to seem so little by little."
+
+"Take care, now, your jug does n't burst!" exclaimed Lizzie.
+
+"I think sitting for one's portrait is only one of the various forms
+of idleness," said Mr. Wentworth.  "Their name is legion."
+
+"My dear sir," cried Felix, "you can't be said to be idle when you
+are making a man work so!"
+
+"One might be painted while one is asleep," suggested Mr. Brand,
+as a contribution to the discussion.
+
+"Ah, do paint me while I am asleep," said Gertrude to Felix, smiling.
+And she closed her eyes a little.  It had by this time become a matter
+of almost exciting anxiety to Charlotte what Gertrude would say or
+would do next.
+
+She began to sit for her portrait on the following day--
+in the open air, on the north side of the piazza.  "I wish
+you would tell me what you think of us--how we seem to you,"
+she said to Felix, as he sat before his easel.
+
+"You seem to me the best people in the world," said Felix.
+
+"You say that," Gertrude resumed, "because it saves you the trouble
+of saying anything else."
+
+The young man glanced at her over the top of his canvas.
+"What else should I say?  It would certainly be a great deal
+of trouble to say anything different."
+
+"Well," said Gertrude, "you have seen people before that you have liked,
+have you not?"
+
+"Indeed I have, thank Heaven!"
+
+"And they have been very different from us," Gertrude went on.
+
+"That only proves," said Felix, "that there are a thousand different
+ways of being good company."
+
+"Do you think us good company?" asked Gertrude.
+
+"Company for a king!"
+
+Gertrude was silent a moment; and then, "There must be a thousand
+different ways of being dreary," she said; "and sometimes I think
+we make use of them all."
+
+Felix stood up quickly, holding up his hand.  "If you could only keep
+that look on your face for half an hour--while I catch it!" he said.
+"It is uncommonly handsome."
+
+"To look handsome for half an hour--that is a great deal to ask
+of me," she answered.
+
+"It would be the portrait of a young woman who has taken some vow,
+some pledge, that she repents of," said Felix, "and who is thinking
+it over at leisure."
+
+"I have taken no vow, no pledge," said Gertrude, very gravely;
+"I have nothing to repent of."
+
+"My dear cousin, that was only a figure of speech.
+I am very sure that no one in your excellent family has anything
+to repent of."
+
+"And yet we are always repenting!"  Gertrude exclaimed.
+"That is what I mean by our being dreary.  You know it perfectly well;
+you only pretend that you don't."
+
+Felix gave a quick laugh.  "The half hour is going on,
+and yet you are handsomer than ever.  One must be careful
+what one says, you see."
+
+"To me," said Gertrude, "you can say anything."
+
+Felix looked at her, as an artist might, and painted for some
+time in silence.
+
+"Yes, you seem to me different from your father and sister--
+from most of the people you have lived with," he observed.
+
+"To say that one's self," Gertrude went on, "is like saying--
+by implication, at least--that one is better.  I am not better;
+I am much worse.  But they say themselves that I am different.
+It makes them unhappy."
+
+"Since you accuse me of concealing my real impressions,
+I may admit that I think the tendency--among you generally--
+is to be made unhappy too easily."
+
+"I wish you would tell that to my father," said Gertrude.
+
+"It might make him more unhappy!"  Felix exclaimed, laughing.
+
+"It certainly would.  I don't believe you have seen people like that."
+
+"Ah, my dear cousin, how do you know what I have seen?"  Felix demanded.
+"How can I tell you?"
+
+"You might tell me a great many things, if you only would.  You have seen
+people like yourself--people who are bright and gay and fond of amusement.
+We are not fond of amusement."
+
+"Yes," said Felix, "I confess that rather strikes me.
+You don't seem to me to get all the pleasure out of life
+that you might.  You
+don't seem to me to enjoy..... Do you mind my saying this?" he 
+asked, pausing.
+
+"Please go on," said the girl, earnestly.
+
+"You seem to me very well placed for enjoying.  You have money
+and liberty and what is called in Europe a 'position.'
+But you take a painful view of life, as one may say."
+
+"One ought to think it bright and charming and delightful,
+eh?" asked Gertrude.
+
+"I should say so--if one can.  It is true it all depends
+upon that," Felix added.
+
+"You know there is a great deal of misery in the world,"
+said his model.
+
+"I have seen a little of it," the young man rejoined.
+"But it was all over there--beyond the sea.  I don't see any here.
+This is a paradise."
+
+Gertrude said nothing; she sat looking at the dahlias and the
+currant-bushes in the garden, while Felix went on with his work.
+"To 'enjoy,' " she began at last, "to take life--not painfully,
+must one do something wrong?"
+
+Felix gave his long, light laugh again.  "Seriously, I think not.
+And for this reason, among others:  you strike me as very capable
+of enjoying, if the chance were given you, and yet at the same time
+as incapable of wrong-doing."
+
+"I am sure," said Gertrude, "that you are very wrong
+in telling a person that she is incapable of that.
+We are never nearer to evil than when we believe that."
+
+"You are handsomer than ever," observed Felix, irrelevantly.
+
+Gertrude had got used to hearing him say this.
+There was not so much excitement in it as at first.
+"What ought one to do?" she continued.  "To give parties,
+to go to the theatre, to read novels, to keep late hours?"
+
+"I don't think it 's what one does or one does n't
+do that promotes enjoyment," her companion answered.
+"It is the general way of looking at life."
+
+"They look at it as a discipline--that 's what they do here.
+I have often been told that."
+
+"Well, that 's very good.  But there is another way," added Felix, smiling:
+"to look at it as an opportunity."
+
+"An opportunity--yes," said Gertrude.  "One would get more pleasure that way."
+
+"I don't attempt to say anything better for it than that it
+has been my own way--and that is not saying much!"
+Felix had laid down his palette and brushes; he was leaning back,
+with his arms folded, to judge the effect of his work.
+"And you know," he said, "I am a very petty personage."
+
+"You have a great deal of talent," said Gertrude.
+
+"No--no," the young man rejoined, in a tone of cheerful impartiality,
+"I have not a great deal of talent.  It is nothing at all remarkable.
+I assure you I should know if it were.  I shall always be obscure.
+The world will never hear of me."  Gertrude looked at him with a
+strange feeling.  She was thinking of the great world which he knew
+and which she did not, and how full of brilliant talents it
+must be, since it could afford to make light of his abilities.
+"You need n't in general attach much importance to anything I
+tell you," he pursued; "but you may believe me when I say this,--
+that I am little better than a good-natured feather-head."
+
+"A feather-head?" she repeated.
+
+"I am a species of Bohemian."
+
+"A Bohemian?"  Gertrude had never heard this term before, save as
+a geographical denomination; and she quite failed to understand
+the figurative meaning which her companion appeared to attach to it.
+But it gave her pleasure.
+
+Felix had pushed back his chair and risen to his feet;
+he slowly came toward her, smiling.  "I am a sort of adventurer,"
+he said, looking down at her.
+
+She got up, meeting his smile.  "An adventurer?" she repeated.
+"I should like to hear your adventures."
+
+For an instant she believed that he was going to take her hand;
+but he dropped his own hands suddenly into the pockets of his
+painting-jacket. "There is no reason why you should n't," he said.
+"I have been an adventurer, but my adventures have been very innocent.
+They have all been happy ones; I don't think there are any I should n't tell.
+They were very pleasant and very pretty; I should like to go over them
+in memory.  Sit down again, and I will begin," he added in a moment,
+with his naturally persuasive smile.
+
+Gertrude sat down again on that day, and she sat down on
+several other days.  Felix, while he plied his brush, told her
+a great many stories, and she listened with charmed avidity.
+Her eyes rested upon his lips; she was very serious; sometimes,
+from her air of wondering gravity, he thought she was displeased.
+But Felix never believed for more than a single moment in any displeasure
+of his own producing.  This would have been fatuity if the optimism
+it expressed had not been much more a hope than a prejudice.
+It is beside the matter to say that he had a good conscience;
+for the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and this young man's
+brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in objective good intentions
+which were ignorant of any test save exactness in hitting their mark.
+He told Gertrude how he had walked over France and Italy with a painter's
+knapsack on his back, paying his way often by knocking off a flattering
+portrait of his host or hostess.  He told her how he had played
+the violin in a little band of musicians--not of high celebrity--
+who traveled through foreign lands giving provincial concerts.
+He told her also how he had been a momentary ornament of a troupe
+of strolling actors, engaged in the arduous task of interpreting
+Shakespeare to French and German, Polish and Hungarian audiences.
+
+While this periodical recital was going on, Gertrude lived
+in a fantastic world; she seemed to herself to be reading
+a romance that came out in daily numbers.  She had known nothing
+so delightful since the perusal of "Nicholas Nickleby."
+One afternoon she went to see her cousin, Mrs. Acton,
+Robert's mother, who was a great invalid, never leaving the house.
+She came back alone, on foot, across the fields--this being
+a short way which they often used.  Felix had gone to Boston
+with her father, who desired to take the young man to call upon
+some of his friends, old gentlemen who remembered his mother--
+remembered her, but said nothing about her--and several
+of whom, with the gentle ladies their wives, had driven out
+from town to pay their respects at the little house among
+the apple-trees, in vehicles which reminded the Baroness,
+who received her visitors with discriminating civility,
+of the large, light, rattling barouche in which she herself had
+made her journey to this neighborhood.  The afternoon was waning;
+in the western sky the great picture of a New England sunset,
+painted in crimson and silver, was suspended from the zenith;
+and the stony pastures, as Gertrude traversed them, thinking
+intently to herself, were covered with a light, clear glow.
+At the open gate of one of the fields she saw from the distance
+a man's figure; he stood there as if he were waiting
+for her, and as she came nearer she recognized Mr. Brand.
+She had a feeling as of not having seen him for some time;
+she could not have said for how long, for it yet seemed to her
+that he had been very lately at the house.
+
+"May I walk back with you?" he asked.  And when she had said
+that he might if he wanted, he observed that he had seen her
+and recognized her half a mile away.
+
+"You must have very good eyes," said Gertrude.
+
+"Yes, I have very good eyes, Miss Gertrude," said Mr. Brand.
+She perceived that he meant something; but for a long time past
+Mr. Brand had constantly meant something, and she had almost
+got used to it.  She felt, however, that what he meant had now
+a renewed power to disturb her, to perplex and agitate her.
+He walked beside her in silence for a moment, and then he added,
+"I have had no trouble in seeing that you are beginning to avoid me.
+But perhaps," he went on, "one need n't have had very good eyes
+to see that."
+
+"I have not avoided you," said Gertrude, without looking at him.
+
+"I think you have been unconscious that you were avoiding me,"
+Mr. Brand replied.  "You have not even known that I was there."
+
+"Well, you are here now, Mr. Brand!" said Gertrude, with a little laugh.
+"I know that very well."
+
+He made no rejoinder.  He simply walked beside her slowly,
+as they were obliged to walk over the soft grass.
+Presently they came to another gate, which was closed.
+Mr. Brand laid his hand upon it, but he made no movement
+to open it; he stood and looked at his companion.
+"You are very much interested--very much absorbed," he said.
+
+Gertrude glanced at him; she saw that he was pale and that
+he looked excited.  She had never seen Mr. Brand excited before,
+and she felt that the spectacle, if fully carried out,
+would be impressive, almost painful.  "Absorbed in what?"
+she asked.  Then she looked away at the illuminated sky.
+She felt guilty and uncomfortable, and yet she was vexed
+with herself for feeling so.  But Mr. Brand, as he stood
+there looking at her with his small, kind, persistent eyes,
+represented an immense body of half-obliterated obligations,
+that were rising again into a certain distinctness.
+
+"You have new interests, new occupations," he went on.
+"I don't know that I can say that you have new duties.
+We have always old ones, Gertrude," he added.
+
+"Please open the gate, Mr. Brand," she said; and she felt as if,
+in saying so, she were cowardly and petulant.  But he opened the gate,
+and allowed her to pass; then he closed it behind himself.
+Before she had time to turn away he put out his hand and held her
+an instant by the wrist.
+
+"I want to say something to you," he said.
+
+"I know what you want to say," she answered.  And she was on
+the point of adding, "And I know just how you will say it;"
+but these words she kept back.
+
+"I love you, Gertrude," he said.  "I love you very much;
+I love you more than ever."
+
+He said the words just as she had known he would;
+she had heard them before.  They had no charm for her;
+she had said to herself before that it was very strange.
+It was supposed to be delightful for a woman to listen
+to such words; but these seemed to her flat and mechanical.
+"I wish you would forget that," she declared.
+
+"How can I--why should I?" he asked.
+
+"I have made you no promise--given you no pledge," she said,
+looking at him, with her voice trembling a little.
+
+"You have let me feel that I have an influence over you.
+You have opened your mind to me."
+
+"I never opened my mind to you, Mr. Brand!"  Gertrude cried,
+with some vehemence.
+
+"Then you were not so frank as I thought--as we all thought."
+
+"I don't see what any one else had to do with it!" cried the girl.
+
+"I mean your father and your sister.  You know it makes them
+happy to think you will listen to me."
+
+She gave a little laugh.  "It does n't make them happy," she said.
+"Nothing makes them happy.  No one is happy here."
+
+"I think your cousin is very happy--Mr. Young," rejoined Mr. Brand,
+in a soft, almost timid tone.
+
+"So much the better for him!"  And Gertrude gave her little laugh again.
+
+The young man looked at her a moment.  "You are very much changed," he said.
+
+"I am glad to hear it," Gertrude declared.
+
+"I am not.  I have known you a long time, and I have loved
+you as you were."
+
+"I am much obliged to you," said Gertrude.  "I must be going home.  "
+
+He on his side, gave a little laugh.
+
+"You certainly do avoid me--you see!"
+
+"Avoid me, then," said the girl.
+
+He looked at her again; and then, very gently, "No I will not avoid you,"
+he replied; "but I will leave you, for the present, to yourself.  I think
+you will remember--after a while--some of the things you have forgotten.
+I think you will come back to me; I have great faith in that."
+
+This time his voice was very touching; there was a strong,
+reproachful force in what he said, and Gertrude could
+answer nothing.  He turned away and stood there, leaning his
+elbows on the gate and looking at the beautiful sunset.
+Gertrude left him and took her way home again; but when she reached
+the middle of the next field she suddenly burst into tears.
+Her tears seemed to her to have been a long time gathering,
+and for some moments it was a kind of glee to shed them.
+But they presently passed away.  There was something a little
+hard about Gertrude; and she never wept again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Going of an afternoon to call upon his niece, Mr. Wentworth more
+than once found Robert Acton sitting in her little drawing-room.
+This was in no degree, to Mr. Wentworth, a perturbing fact,
+for he had no sense of competing with his young kinsman for
+Eugenia's good graces.  Madame Munster's uncle had the highest
+opinion of Robert Acton, who, indeed, in the family at large,
+was the object of a great deal of undemonstrative appreciation.
+They were all proud of him, in so far as the charge of being
+proud may be brought against people who were, habitually,
+distinctly guiltless of the misdemeanor known as "taking credit."
+They never boasted of Robert Acton, nor indulged in vainglorious
+reference to him; they never quoted the clever things
+he had said, nor mentioned the generous things he had done.
+But a sort of frigidly-tender faith in his unlimited goodness
+was a part of their personal sense of right; and there can,
+perhaps, be no better proof of the high esteem in which he was
+held than the fact that no explicit judgment was ever passed
+upon his actions.  He was no more praised than he was blamed;
+but he was tacitly felt to be an ornament to his circle.
+He was the man of the world of the family.  He had been to China
+and brought home a collection of curiosities; he had made a fortune--
+or rather he had quintupled a fortune already considerable;
+he was distinguished by that combination of celibacy,
+"property," and good humor which appeals to even the most
+subdued imaginations; and it was taken for granted that he would
+presently place these advantages at the disposal of some
+well-regulated young woman of his own "set."  Mr. Wentworth was
+not a man to admit to himself that--his paternal duties apart--
+he liked any individual much better than all other individuals;
+but he thought Robert Acton extremely judicious; and this was
+perhaps as near an approach as he was capable of to the eagerness
+of preference, which his temperament repudiated as it would
+have disengaged itself from something slightly unchaste.
+Acton was, in fact, very judicious--and something more beside;
+and indeed it must be claimed for Mr. Wentworth that in the more
+illicit parts of his preference there hovered the vague
+adumbration of a belief that his cousin's final merit was
+a certain enviable capacity for whistling, rather gallantly,
+at the sanctions of mere judgment--for showing a larger courage,
+a finer quality of pluck, than common occasion demanded.
+Mr. Wentworth would never have risked the intimation that Acton
+was made, in the smallest degree, of the stuff of a hero;
+but this is small blame to him, for Robert would certainly
+never have risked it himself.  Acton certainly exercised great
+discretion in all things--beginning with his estimate of himself.
+He knew that he was by no means so much of a man of the world
+as he was supposed to be in local circles; but it must be added
+that he knew also that his natural shrewdness had a reach
+of which he had never quite given local circles the measure.
+He was addicted to taking the humorous view of things,
+and he had discovered that even in the narrowest circles
+such a disposition may find frequent opportunities.
+Such opportunities had formed for some time--that is, since his
+return from China, a year and a half before--the most active
+element in this gentleman's life, which had just now a rather
+indolent air.  He was perfectly willing to get married.
+He was very fond of books, and he had a handsome library;
+that is, his books were much more numerous than Mr. Wentworth's.
+He was also very fond of pictures; but it must be confessed,
+in the fierce light of contemporary criticism, that his walls
+were adorned with several rather abortive masterpieces.  He had got
+his learning--and there was more of it than commonly appeared--
+at Harvard College; and he took a pleasure in old associations,
+which made it a part of his daily contentment to live so near
+this institution that he often passed it in driving to Boston.
+He was extremely interested in the Baroness Munster.
+
+She was very frank with him; or at least she intended to be.
+"I am sure you find it very strange that I should have settled
+down in this out-of-the-way part of the world!" she said
+to him three or four weeks after she had installed herself.
+"I am certain you are wondering about my motives.  They are
+very pure."  The Baroness by this time was an old inhabitant;
+the best society in Boston had called upon her, and Clifford
+Wentworth had taken her several times to drive in his buggy.
+
+Robert Acton was seated near her, playing with a fan; there were always
+several fans lying about her drawing-room, with long ribbons of different
+colors attached to them, and Acton was always playing with one.
+"No, I don't find it at all strange," he said slowly, smiling.
+"That a clever woman should turn up in Boston, or its suburbs--that does
+not require so much explanation.  Boston is a very nice place."
+
+"If you wish to make me contradict you," said the Baroness,
+"vous vous y prenez mal.  In certain moods there is nothing
+I am not capable of agreeing to.  Boston is a paradise,
+and we are in the suburbs of Paradise."
+
+"Just now I am not at all in the suburbs; I am in the place itself,"
+rejoined Acton, who was lounging a little in his chair.
+He was, however, not always lounging; and when he was he was
+not quite so relaxed as he pretended.  To a certain extent,
+he sought refuge from shyness in this appearance of relaxation;
+and like many persons in the same circumstances he somewhat
+exaggerated the appearance.  Beyond this, the air of being
+much at his ease was a cover for vigilant observation.
+He was more than interested in this clever woman, who, whatever he
+might say, was clever not at all after the Boston fashion;
+she plunged him into a kind of excitement, held him in
+vague suspense.  He was obliged to admit to himself that he had
+never yet seen a woman just like this--not even in China.
+He was ashamed, for inscrutable reasons, of the vivacity of
+his emotion, and he carried it off, superficially, by taking,
+still superficially, the humorous view of Madame Munster.
+It was not at all true that he thought it very natural
+of her to have made this pious pilgrimage.  It might have
+been said of him in advance that he was too good a Bostonian
+to regard in the light of an eccentricity the desire of even
+the remotest alien to visit the New England metropolis.
+This was an impulse for which, surely, no apology was needed;
+and Madame Munster was the fortunate possessor of several New
+England cousins.  In fact, however, Madame Munster struck
+him as out of keeping with her little circle; she was at
+the best a very agreeable, a gracefully mystifying anomaly.
+He knew very well that it would not do to address these reflections
+too crudely to Mr. Wentworth; he would never have remarked to
+the old gentleman that he wondered what the Baroness was up to.
+And indeed he had no great desire to share his vague mistrust
+with any one.  There was a personal pleasure in it; the greatest
+pleasure he had known at least since he had come from China.
+He would keep the Baroness, for better or worse, to himself;
+he had a feeling that he deserved to enjoy a monopoly of her,
+for he was certainly the person who had most adequately gauged
+her capacity for social intercourse.  Before long it became
+apparent to him that the Baroness was disposed to lay no tax
+upon such a monopoly.
+
+One day (he was sitting there again and playing with a fan)
+she asked him to apologize, should the occasion present itself,
+to certain people in Boston for her not having returned their calls.
+"There are half a dozen places," she said; "a formidable list.
+Charlotte Wentworth has written it out for me, in a terrifically
+distinct hand.  There is no ambiguity on the subject;
+I know perfectly where I must go.  Mr. Wentworth informs me that
+the carriage is always at my disposal, and Charlotte offers to go
+with me, in a pair of tight gloves and a very stiff petticoat.
+And yet for three days I have been putting it off.
+They must think me horribly vicious."
+
+"You ask me to apologize," said Acton, "but you don't tell me
+what excuse I can offer."
+
+"That is more," the Baroness declared, "than I am held to.  It would
+be like my asking you to buy me a bouquet and giving you the money.
+I have no reason except that--somehow--it 's too violent an effort.
+It is not inspiring.  Would n't that serve as an excuse, in Boston?
+I am told they are very sincere; they don't tell fibs.
+And then Felix ought to go with me, and he is never in readiness.
+I don't see him.  He is always roaming about the fields and sketching
+old barns, or taking ten-mile walks, or painting some one's portrait,
+or rowing on the pond, or flirting with Gertrude Wentworth."
+
+"I should think it would amuse you to go and see a few people,"
+said Acton.  "You are having a very quiet time of it here.
+It 's a dull life for you."
+
+"Ah, the quiet,--the quiet!" the Baroness exclaimed.  "That 's what I like.
+It 's rest.  That 's what I came here for.  Amusement?  I have had amusement.
+And as for seeing people--I have already seen a great many in my life.
+If it did n't sound ungracious I should say that I wish very humbly your
+people here would leave me alone!"
+
+Acton looked at her a moment, and she looked at him.
+She was a woman who took being looked at remarkably well.
+"So you have come here for rest?" he asked.
+
+"So I may say.  I came for many of those reasons that are
+no reasons--don't you know?--and yet that are really the best:
+to come away, to change, to break with everything.
+When once one comes away one must arrive somewhere, and I
+asked myself why I should n't arrive here."
+
+"You certainly had time on the way!" said Acton, laughing.
+
+Madame Munster looked at him again; and then, smiling:
+"And I have certainly had time, since I got here, to ask myself
+why I came.  However, I never ask myself idle questions.
+Here I am, and it seems to me you ought only to thank me."
+
+"When you go away you will see the difficulties I shall put in your path."
+
+"You mean to put difficulties in my path?" she asked,
+rearranging the rosebud in her corsage.
+
+"The greatest of all--that of having been so agreeable"--
+
+"That I shall be unable to depart?  Don't be too sure.
+I have left some very agreeable people over there."
+
+"Ah," said Acton, "but it was to come here, where I am!"
+
+"I did n't know of your existence.  Excuse me for saying anything
+so rude; but, honestly speaking, I did not.  No," the Baroness pursued,
+"it was precisely not to see you--such people as you--that I came."
+
+"Such people as me?" cried Acton.
+
+"I had a sort of longing to come into those natural relations which I knew I
+should find here.  Over there I had only, as I may say, artificial relations.
+Don't you see the difference?"
+
+"The difference tells against me," said Acton.  "I suppose I
+am an artificial relation."
+
+"Conventional," declared the Baroness; "very conventional."
+
+"Well, there is one way in which the relation of a lady and a gentleman
+may always become natural," said Acton.
+
+"You mean by their becoming lovers?  That may be natural or not.
+And at any rate," rejoined Eugenia, "nous n'en sommes pas la!"
+
+They were not, as yet; but a little later, when she began to go
+with him to drive, it might almost have seemed that they were.
+He came for her several times, alone, in his high "wagon," drawn
+by a pair of charming light-limbed horses.  It was different,
+her having gone with Clifford Wentworth, who was her cousin,
+and so much younger.  It was not to be imagined that she should
+have a flirtation with Clifford, who was a mere shame-faced boy,
+and whom a large section of Boston society supposed to be "engaged"
+to Lizzie Acton.  Not, indeed, that it was to be conceived that
+the Baroness was a possible party to any flirtation whatever;
+for she was undoubtedly a married lady.  It was generally known
+that her matrimonial condition was of the "morganatic" order;
+but in its natural aversion to suppose that this meant anything
+less than absolute wedlock, the conscience of the community took
+refuge in the belief that it implied something even more.
+
+Acton wished her to think highly of American scenery, and he drove
+her to great distances, picking out the prettiest roads and
+the largest points of view.  If we are good when we are contented,
+Eugenia's virtues should now certainly have been uppermost;
+for she found a charm in the rapid movement through a wild country,
+and in a companion who from time to time made the vehicle dip,
+with a motion like a swallow's flight, over roads of primitive
+construction, and who, as she felt, would do a great many things
+that she might ask him.  Sometimes, for a couple of hours together,
+there were almost no houses; there were nothing but woods and rivers
+and lakes and horizons adorned with bright-looking mountains.
+It seemed to the Baroness very wild, as I have said, and lovely;
+but the impression added something to that sense of the enlargement
+of opportunity which had been born of her arrival in the New World.
+
+One day--it was late in the afternoon--Acton pulled up his horses
+on the crest of a hill which commanded a beautiful prospect.
+He let them stand a long time to rest, while he sat there
+and talked with Madame M; auunster.  The prospect was
+beautiful in spite of there being nothing human within sight.
+There was a wilderness of woods, and the gleam of a distant river,
+and a glimpse of half the hill-tops in Massachusetts.
+The road had a wide, grassy margin, on the further side of which
+there flowed a deep, clear brook; there were wild flowers in
+the grass, and beside the brook lay the trunk of a fallen tree.
+Acton waited a while; at last a rustic wayfarer came trudging
+along the road.  Acton asked him to hold the horses--
+a service he consented to render, as a friendly turn to a
+fellow-citizen. Then he invited the Baroness to descend,
+and the two wandered away, across the grass, and sat down on
+the log beside the brook.
+
+"I imagine it does n't remind you of Silberstadt," said Acton.
+It was the first time that he had mentioned Silberstadt to her,
+for particular reasons.  He knew she had a husband there,
+and this was disagreeable to him; and, furthermore, it had been
+repeated to him that this husband wished to put her away--a state
+of affairs to which even indirect reference was to be deprecated.
+It was true, nevertheless, that the Baroness herself had often
+alluded to Silberstadt; and Acton had often wondered why her husband
+wished to get rid of her.  It was a curious position for a lady--
+this being known as a repudiated wife; and it is worthy of observation
+that the Baroness carried it off with exceeding grace and dignity.
+She had made it felt, from the first, that there were two sides
+to the question, and that her own side, when she should choose
+to present it, would be replete with touching interest.
+
+"It does not remind me of the town, of course," she said,
+"of the sculptured gables and the Gothic churches, of the
+wonderful Schloss, with its moat and its clustering towers.
+But it has a little look of some other parts of the principality.
+One might fancy one's self among those grand old German forests,
+those legendary mountains; the sort of country one sees from
+the windows at Shreckenstein."
+
+"What is Shreckenstein?" asked Acton.
+
+"It is a great castle,--the summer residence of the Reigning Prince."
+
+"Have you ever lived there?"
+
+"I have stayed there," said the Baroness.  Acton was silent;
+he looked a while at the uncastled landscape before him.
+"It is the first time you have ever asked me about Silberstadt,"
+she said.  "I should think you would want to know about my marriage;
+it must seem to you very strange."
+
+Acton looked at her a moment.  "Now you would n't like me to say that!"
+
+"You Americans have such odd ways!" the Baroness declared.
+"You never ask anything outright; there seem to be so many
+things you can't talk about."
+
+"We Americans are very polite," said Acton, whose national
+consciousness had been complicated by a residence in
+foreign lands, and who yet disliked to hear Americans abused.
+"We don't like to tread upon people's toes," he said.
+"But I should like very much to hear about your marriage.
+Now tell me how it came about."
+
+"The Prince fell in love with me," replied the Baroness simply.
+"He pressed his suit very hard.  At first he did n't wish me to marry him;
+on the contrary.  But on that basis I refused to listen to him.
+So he offered me marriage--in so far as he might.  I was young,
+and I confess I was rather flattered.  But if it were to be done
+again now, I certainly should not accept him."
+
+"How long ago was this?" asked Acton.
+
+"Oh--several years," said Eugenia.  "You should never ask
+a woman for dates."
+
+"Why, I should think that when a woman was relating history"....
+Acton answered.  "And now he wants to break it off?"
+
+"They want him to make a political marriage.  It is his brother's idea.
+His brother is very clever."
+
+"They must be a precious pair!" cried Robert Acton.
+
+The Baroness gave a little philosophic shrug.  "Que voulez-vous?
+They are princes.  They think they are treating me very well.
+Silberstadt is a perfectly despotic little state, and the Reigning
+Prince may annul the marriage by a stroke of his pen.
+But he has promised me, nevertheless, not to do so without
+my formal consent."
+
+"And this you have refused?"
+
+"Hitherto.  It is an indignity, and I have wished at least to make it
+difficult for them.  But I have a little document in my writing-desk
+which I have only to sign and send back to the Prince."
+
+"Then it will be all over?"
+
+The Baroness lifted her hand, and dropped it again.
+"Of course I shall keep my title; at least, I shall be at
+liberty to keep it if I choose.  And I suppose I shall keep it.
+One must have a name.  And I shall keep my pension.
+It is very small--it is wretchedly small; but it is what
+I live on."
+
+"And you have only to sign that paper?"  Acton asked.
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment.  "Do you urge it?"
+
+He got up slowly, and stood with his hands in his pockets.
+"What do you gain by not doing it?"
+
+"I am supposed to gain this advantage--that if I delay, or temporize,
+the Prince may come back to me, may make a stand against his brother.
+He is very fond of me, and his brother has pushed him only little by little."
+
+"If he were to come back to you," said Acton, "would you--
+would you take him back?"
+
+The Baroness met his eyes; she colored just a little.  Then she rose.
+"I should have the satisfaction of saying, 'Now it is my turn.
+I break with your serene highness!' "
+
+They began to walk toward the carriage.  "Well," said Robert Acton,
+"it 's a curious story!  How did you make his acquaintance?"
+
+"I was staying with an old lady--an old Countess--in Dresden.
+She had been a friend of my father's. My father was dead;
+I was very much alone.  My brother was wandering about the world
+in a theatrical troupe."
+
+"Your brother ought to have stayed with you," Acton observed,
+"and kept you from putting your trust in princes."
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment, and then, "He did what he could,"
+she said.  "He sent me money.  The old Countess encouraged
+the Prince; she was even pressing.  It seems to me,"
+Madame Munster added, gently, "that--under the circumstances--
+I behaved very well."
+
+Acton glanced at her, and made the observation--he had made it before--
+that a woman looks the prettier for having unfolded her wrongs or
+her sufferings.  "Well," he reflected, audibly, "I should like to see
+you send his serene highness--somewhere!"
+
+Madame Munster stooped and plucked a daisy from the grass.
+"And not sign my renunciation?"
+
+"Well, I don't know--I don't know," said Acton.
+
+"In one case I should have my revenge; in another case I
+should have my liberty."
+
+Acton gave a little laugh as he helped her into the carriage.
+"At any rate," he said, "take good care of that paper."
+
+A couple of days afterward he asked her to come and see his house.
+The visit had already been proposed, but it had been put off in
+consequence of his mother's illness.  She was a constant invalid,
+and she had passed these recent years, very patiently, in a great
+flowered arm-chair at her bedroom window.  Lately, for some days,
+she had been unable to see any one; but now she was better,
+and she sent the Baroness a very civil message.  Acton had wished
+their visitor to come to dinner; but Madame M; auunster preferred
+to begin with a simple call.  She had reflected that if she should
+go to dinner Mr. Wentworth and his daughters would also be asked,
+and it had seemed to her that the peculiar character of the occasion
+would be best preserved in a tete-a-tete with her host.
+Why the occasion should have a peculiar character she explained to no one.
+As far as any one could see, it was simply very pleasant.
+Acton came for her and drove her to his door, an operation which was
+rapidly performed.  His house the Baroness mentally pronounced a very
+good one; more articulately, she declared that it was enchanting.
+It was large and square and painted brown; it stood in a well-kept
+shrubbery, and was approached, from the gate, by a short drive.
+It was, moreover, a much more modern dwelling than Mr. Wentworth's,
+and was more redundantly upholstered and expensively ornamented.
+The Baroness perceived that her entertainer had analyzed material
+comfort to a sufficiently fine point.  And then he possessed the most
+delightful chinoiseries--trophies of his sojourn in the Celestial Empire:
+pagodas of ebony and cabinets of ivory; sculptured monsters,
+grinning and leering on chimney-pieces, in front of beautifully
+figured hand-screens; porcelain dinner-sets, gleaming behind
+the glass doors of mahogany buffets; large screens, in corners,
+covered with tense silk and embroidered with mandarins and dragons.
+These things were scattered all over the house, and they
+gave Eugenia a pretext for a complete domiciliary visit.
+She liked it, she enjoyed it; she thought it a very nice place.
+It had a mixture of the homely and the liberal, and though it
+was almost a museum, the large, little-used rooms were as fresh
+and clean as a well-kept dairy.  Lizzie Acton told her that she dusted
+all the pagodas and other curiosities every day with her own hands;
+and the Baroness answered that she was evidently a household fairy.
+Lizzie had not at all the look of a young lady who dusted things;
+she wore such pretty dresses and had such delicate fingers
+that it was difficult to imagine her immersed in sordid cares.
+She came to meet Madame M; auunster on her arrival, but she
+said nothing, or almost nothing, and the Baroness again reflected--
+she had had occasion to do so before--that American girls had no manners.
+She disliked this little American girl, and she was quite prepared
+to learn that she had failed to commend herself to Miss Acton.
+Lizzie struck her as positive and explicit almost to pertness;
+and the idea of her combining the apparent incongruities of a taste
+for housework and the wearing of fresh, Parisian-looking dresses
+suggested the possession of a dangerous energy.  It was a source
+of irritation to the Baroness that in this country it should seem
+to matter whether a little girl were a trifle less or a trifle
+more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been conscious of no
+moral pressure as regards the appreciation of diminutive virgins.
+It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie's pertness that she
+very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother's hands.
+Acton talked a great deal about his chinoiseries; he knew a good
+deal about porcelain and bric-a-brac. The Baroness, in her progress
+through the house, made, as it were, a great many stations.
+She sat down everywhere, confessed to being a little tired, and asked about
+the various objects with a curious mixture of alertness and inattention.
+If there had been any one to say it to she would have declared that
+she was positively in love with her host; but she could hardly make
+this declaration--even in the strictest confidence--to Acton himself.
+It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the charm of
+unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keenness with which she was
+capable of feeling things, that he had a disposition without any edges;
+that even his humorous irony always expanded toward the point.
+One's impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch
+of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally
+an inconvenience.  One could trust him, at any rate, round all
+the corners of the world; and, withal, he was not absolutely simple,
+which would have been excess; he was only relatively simple,
+which was quite enough for the Baroness.
+
+Lizzie reappeared to say that her mother would now be happy to receive
+Madame Munster; and the Baroness followed her to Mrs. Acton's apartment.
+Eugenia reflected, as she went, that it was not the affectation
+of impertinence that made her dislike this young lady, for on
+that ground she could easily have beaten her.  It was not an
+aspiration on the girl's part to rivalry, but a kind of laughing,
+childishly-mocking indifference to the results of comparison.
+Mrs. Acton was an emaciated, sweet-faced woman of five and fifty,
+sitting with pillows behind her, and looking out on a clump
+of hemlocks.  She was very modest, very timid, and very ill;
+she made Eugenia feel grateful that she herself was not like that--
+neither so ill, nor, possibly, so modest.  On a chair, beside her,
+lay a volume of Emerson's Essays.  It was a great occasion for poor
+Mrs. Acton, in her helpless condition, to be confronted with a clever
+foreign lady, who had more manner than any lady--any dozen ladies--
+that she had ever seen.
+
+"I have heard a great deal about you," she said, softly, to the Baroness.
+
+"From your son, eh?"  Eugenia asked.  "He has talked to me immensely
+of you.  Oh, he talks of you as you would like," the Baroness declared;
+"as such a son must talk of such a mother!"
+
+Mrs. Acton sat gazing; this was part of Madame Munster's "manner."
+But Robert Acton was gazing too, in vivid consciousness that
+he had barely mentioned his mother to their brilliant guest.
+He never talked of this still maternal presence,--a presence
+refined to such delicacy that it had almost resolved itself,
+with him, simply into the subjective emotion of gratitude.
+And Acton rarely talked of his emotions.  The Baroness turned
+her smile toward him, and she instantly felt that she had
+been observed to be fibbing.  She had struck a false note.
+But who were these people to whom such fibbing was not pleasing?
+If they were annoyed, the Baroness was equally so; and after the
+exchange of a few civil inquiries and low-voiced responses she took
+leave of Mrs. Acton.  She begged Robert not to come home with her;
+she would get into the carriage alone; she preferred that.
+This was imperious, and she thought he looked disappointed.
+While she stood before the door with him--the carriage was
+turning in the gravel-walk--this thought restored her serenity.
+
+When she had given him her hand in farewell she looked at him a moment.
+"I have almost decided to dispatch that paper," she said.
+
+He knew that she alluded to the document that she had called her renunciation;
+and he assisted her into the carriage without saying anything.
+But just before the vehicle began to move he said, "Well, when you
+have in fact dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Felix young finished Gertrude's portrait, and he afterwards transferred
+to canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it
+may be said that he had become for the time the pivot and the centre.
+I am afraid it must be confessed that he was a decidedly
+flattering painter, and that he imparted to his models a romantic
+grace which seemed easily and cheaply acquired by the payment of a
+hundred dollars to a young man who made "sitting" so entertaining.
+For Felix was paid for his pictures, making, as he did, no secret
+of the fact that in guiding his steps to the Western world affectionate
+curiosity had gone hand in hand with a desire to better his condition.
+He took his uncle's portrait quite as if Mr. Wentworth had never
+averted himself from the experiment; and as he compassed his end
+only by the exercise of gentle violence, it is but fair to add
+that he allowed the old man to give him nothing but his time.
+He passed his arm into Mr. Wentworth's one summer morning--
+very few arms indeed had ever passed into Mr. Wentworth's--and led
+him across the garden and along the road into the studio which he had
+extemporized in the little house among the apple-trees. The grave
+gentleman felt himself more and more fascinated by his clever nephew,
+whose fresh, demonstrative youth seemed a compendium of experiences
+so strangely numerous.  It appeared to him that Felix must know
+a great deal; he would like to learn what he thought about some
+of those things as regards which his own conversation had always
+been formal, but his knowledge vague.  Felix had a confident,
+gayly trenchant way of judging human actions which Mr. Wentworth
+grew little by little to envy; it seemed like criticism made easy.
+Forming an opinion--say on a person's conduct--was, with Mr. Wentworth,
+a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard.
+He seemed to himself to go about the world with a big bunch
+of these ineffectual instruments at his girdle.  His nephew,
+on the other hand, with a single turn of the wrist, opened any
+door as adroitly as a horse-thief. He felt obliged to keep up
+the convention that an uncle is always wiser than a nephew,
+even if he could keep it up no otherwise than by listening
+in serious silence to Felix's quick, light, constant discourse.
+But there came a day when he lapsed from consistency and almost
+asked his nephew's advice.
+
+"Have you ever entertained the idea of settling in the United States?"
+he asked one morning, while Felix brilliantly plied his brush.
+
+"My dear uncle," said Felix, "excuse me if your question makes me
+smile a little.  To begin with, I have never entertained an idea.
+Ideas often entertain me; but I am afraid I have never seriously
+made a plan.  I know what you are going to say; or rather,
+I know what you think, for I don't think you will say it--
+that this is very frivolous and loose-minded on my part.
+So it is; but I am made like that; I take things as they come,
+and somehow there is always some new thing to follow the last.
+In the second place, I should never propose to settle.
+I can't settle, my dear uncle; I 'm not a settler.
+I know that is what strangers are supposed to do here;
+they always settle.  But I have n't--to answer your question--
+entertained that idea."
+
+"You intend to return to Europe and resume your irregular manner of life?"
+Mr. Wentworth inquired.
+
+"I can't say I intend.  But it 's very likely I shall go back to Europe.
+After all, I am a European.  I feel that, you know.  It will depend a good
+deal upon my sister.  She 's even more of a European than I; here, you know,
+she 's a picture out of her setting.  And as for 'resuming,' dear uncle,
+I really have never given up my irregular manner of life.  What, for me,
+could be more irregular than this?"
+
+"Than what?" asked Mr. Wentworth, with his pale gravity.
+
+"Well, than everything!  Living in the midst of you, this way; this charming,
+quiet, serious family life; fraternizing with Charlotte and Gertrude;
+calling upon twenty young ladies and going out to walk with them;
+sitting with you in the evening on the piazza and listening to the crickets,
+and going to bed at ten o'clock."
+
+"Your description is very animated," said Mr. Wentworth;
+"but I see nothing improper in what you describe."
+
+"Neither do I, dear uncle.  It is extremely delightful;
+I should n't like it if it were improper.  I assure you I
+don't like improper things; though I dare say you think I do,"
+Felix went on, painting away.
+
+"I have never accused you of that."
+
+"Pray don't," said Felix, "because, you see, at bottom I am
+a terrible Philistine."
+
+"A Philistine?" repeated Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"I mean, as one may say, a plain, God-fearing man."
+Mr. Wentworth looked at him reservedly, like a mystified sage,
+and Felix continued, "I trust I shall enjoy a venerable and
+venerated old age.  I mean to live long.  I can hardly call
+that a plan, perhaps; but it 's a keen desire--a rosy vision.
+I shall be a lively, perhaps even a frivolous old man!"
+
+"It is natural," said his uncle, sententiously, "that one
+should desire to prolong an agreeable life.  We have perhaps
+a selfish indisposition to bring our pleasure to a close.
+But I presume," he added, "that you expect to marry."
+
+"That too, dear uncle, is a hope, a desire, a vision," said Felix.
+It occurred to him for an instant that this was possibly a preface
+to the offer of the hand of one of Mr. Wentworth's admirable daughters.
+But in the name of decent modesty and a proper sense of
+the hard realities of this world, Felix banished the thought.
+His uncle was the incarnation of benevolence, certainly; but from
+that to accepting--much more postulating--the idea of a union between
+a young lady with a dowry presumptively brilliant and a penniless
+artist with no prospect of fame, there was a very long way.
+Felix had lately become conscious of a luxurious preference for
+the society--if possible unshared with others--of Gertrude Wentworth;
+but he had relegated this young lady, for the moment, to the coldly
+brilliant category of unattainable possessions.  She was not the first
+woman for whom he had entertained an unpractical admiration.
+He had been in love with duchesses and countesses, and he had made,
+once or twice, a perilously near approach to cynicism in declaring
+that the disinterestedness of women had been overrated.
+On the whole, he had tempered audacity with modesty; and it
+is but fair to him now to say explicitly that he would have been
+incapable of taking advantage of his present large allowance of
+familiarity to make love to the younger of his handsome cousins.
+Felix had grown up among traditions in the light of which such
+a proceeding looked like a grievous breach of hospitality.
+I have said that he was always happy, and it may be counted among
+the present sources of his happiness that he had as regards this
+matter of his relations with Gertrude a deliciously good conscience.
+His own deportment seemed to him suffused with the beauty of virtue--
+a form of beauty that he admired with the same vivacity with which
+he admired all other forms.
+
+"I think that if you marry," said Mr. Wentworth presently,
+"it will conduce to your happiness."
+
+"Sicurissimo!"  Felix exclaimed; and then, arresting his brush, he looked at
+his uncle with a smile.  "There is something I feel tempted to say to you.
+May I risk it?"
+
+Mr. Wentworth drew himself up a little.  "I am very safe;
+I don't repeat things."  But he hoped Felix would not
+risk too much.
+
+Felix was laughing at his answer.
+
+"It 's odd to hear you telling me how to be happy.  I don't think
+you know yourself, dear uncle.  Now, does that sound brutal?"
+
+The old man was silent a moment, and then, with a dry dignity
+that suddenly touched his nephew:  "We may sometimes point
+out a road we are unable to follow."
+
+"Ah, don't tell me you have had any sorrows," Felix rejoined.
+"I did n't suppose it, and I did n't mean to allude to them.
+I simply meant that you all don't amuse yourselves."
+
+"Amuse ourselves?  We are not children."
+
+"Precisely not!  You have reached the proper age.
+I was saying that the other day to Gertrude," Felix added.
+"I hope it was not indiscreet."
+
+"If it was," said Mr. Wentworth, with a keener irony than Felix would
+have thought him capable of, "it was but your way of amusing yourself.
+I am afraid you have never had a trouble."
+
+"Oh, yes, I have!"  Felix declared, with some spirit; "before I knew better.
+But you don't catch me at it again."
+
+Mr. Wentworth maintained for a while a silence more expressive
+than a deep-drawn sigh.  "You have no children," he said at last.
+
+"Don't tell me," Felix exclaimed, "that your charming young people
+are a source of grief to you!"
+
+"I don't speak of Charlotte."  And then, after a pause,
+Mr. Wentworth continued, "I don't speak of Gertrude.
+But I feel considerable anxiety about Clifford.
+I will tell you another time."
+
+The next time he gave Felix a sitting his nephew reminded him that he had
+taken him into his confidence.  "How is Clifford to-day?" Felix asked.
+"He has always seemed to me a young man of remarkable discretion.
+Indeed, he is only too discreet; he seems on his guard against me--
+as if he thought me rather light company.  The other day he told his sister--
+Gertrude repeated it to me--that I was always laughing at him.  If I laugh
+it is simply from the impulse to try and inspire him with confidence.
+That is the only way I have."
+
+"Clifford's situation is no laughing matter," said Mr. Wentworth.
+"It is very peculiar, as I suppose you have guessed."
+
+"Ah, you mean his love affair with his cousin?"
+
+Mr. Wentworth stared, blushing a little.  "I mean his absence from college.
+He has been suspended.  We have decided not to speak of it unless
+we are asked."
+
+"Suspended?"  Felix repeated.
+
+"He has been requested by the Harvard authorities to absent
+himself for six months.  Meanwhile he is studying with Mr. Brand.
+We think Mr. Brand will help him; at least we hope so."
+
+"What befell him at college?"  Felix asked.  "He was too fond of pleasure?
+Mr. Brand certainly will not teach him any of those secrets!"
+
+"He was too fond of something of which he should not have been fond.
+I suppose it is considered a pleasure."
+
+Felix gave his light laugh.  "My dear uncle, is there any doubt about
+its being a pleasure?  C'est de son age, as they say in France."
+
+"I should have said rather it was a vice of later life--
+of disappointed old age."
+
+Felix glanced at his uncle, with his lifted eyebrows, and then,
+"Of what are you speaking?" he demanded, smiling.
+
+"Of the situation in which Clifford was found."
+
+"Ah, he was found--he was caught?"
+
+"Necessarily, he was caught.  He could n't walk; he staggered."
+
+"Oh," said Felix, "he drinks!  I rather suspected that,
+from something I observed the first day I came here.
+I quite agree with you that it is a low taste.  It 's not a vice
+for a gentleman.  He ought to give it up."
+
+"We hope for a good deal from Mr. Brand's influence,"
+Mr. Wentworth went on.  "He has talked to him from the first.
+And he never touches anything himself."
+
+"I will talk to him--I will talk to him!"  Felix declared, gayly.
+
+"What will you say to him?" asked his uncle, with some apprehension.
+
+Felix for some moments answered nothing.  "Do you mean to marry
+him to his cousin?" he asked at last.
+
+"Marry him?" echoed Mr. Wentworth.  "I should n't think his cousin
+would want to marry him."
+
+"You have no understanding, then, with Mrs. Acton?"
+
+Mr. Wentworth stared, almost blankly.  "I have never discussed
+such subjects with her."
+
+"I should think it might be time," said Felix.  "Lizzie Acton
+is admirably pretty, and if Clifford is dangerous...."
+
+"They are not engaged," said Mr. Wentworth.  "I have no reason
+to suppose they are engaged."
+
+"Par exemple!" cried Felix.  "A clandestine engagement?
+Trust me, Clifford, as I say, is a charming boy.
+He is incapable of that.  Lizzie Acton, then, would not be
+jealous of another woman."
+
+"I certainly hope not," said the old man, with a vague sense
+of jealousy being an even lower vice than a love of liquor.
+
+"The best thing for Clifford, then," Felix propounded,
+"is to become interested in some clever, charming woman."
+And he paused in his painting, and, with his elbows on
+his knees, looked with bright communicativeness at his uncle.
+"You see, I believe greatly in the influence of women.
+Living with women helps to make a man a gentleman.
+It is very true Clifford has his sisters, who are so charming.
+But there should be a different sentiment in play from
+the fraternal, you know.  He has Lizzie Acton; but she, perhaps,
+is rather immature."
+
+"I suspect Lizzie has talked to him, reasoned with him,"
+said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"On the impropriety of getting tipsy--on the beauty of temperance?
+That is dreary work for a pretty young girl.  No," Felix continued;
+"Clifford ought to frequent some agreeable woman, who,
+without ever mentioning such unsavory subjects, would give
+him a sense of its being very ridiculous to be fuddled.
+If he could fall in love with her a little, so much the better.
+The thing would operate as a cure."
+
+"Well, now, what lady should you suggest?" asked Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"There is a clever woman under your hand.  My sister."
+
+"Your sister--under my hand?"  Mr. Wentworth repeated.
+
+"Say a word to Clifford.  Tell him to be bold.  He is well
+disposed already; he has invited her two or three times to drive.
+But I don't think he comes to see her.  Give him a hint to come--
+to come often.  He will sit there of an afternoon, and they will talk.
+It will do him good.  "
+
+Mr. Wentworth meditated.  "You think she will exercise a helpful influence?"
+
+"She will exercise a civilizing--I may call it a sobering--influence.
+A charming, clever, witty woman always does--especially if she is a little
+of a coquette.  My dear uncle, the society of such women has been half
+my education.  If Clifford is suspended, as you say, from college,
+let Eugenia be his preceptress."
+
+Mr. Wentworth continued thoughtful.  "You think Eugenia is
+a coquette?" he asked.
+
+"What pretty woman is not?"  Felix demanded in turn.
+But this, for Mr. Wentworth, could at the best have been no answer,
+for he did not think his niece pretty.  "With Clifford,"
+the young man pursued, "Eugenia will simply be enough of a
+coquette to be a little ironical.  That 's what he needs.
+So you recommend him to be nice with her, you know.
+The suggestion will come best from you."
+
+"Do I understand," asked the old man, "that I am to suggest to my son
+to make a--a profession of--of affection to Madame Munster?"
+
+"Yes, yes--a profession!" cried Felix sympathetically.
+
+"But, as I understand it, Madame Munster is a married woman."
+
+"Ah," said Felix, smiling, "of course she can't marry him.
+But she will do what she can."
+
+Mr. Wentworth sat for some time with his eyes on the floor;
+at last he got up.  "I don't think," he said, "that I can
+undertake to recommend my son any such course."  And without
+meeting Felix's surprised glance he broke off his sitting,
+which was not resumed for a fortnight.
+
+Felix was very fond of the little lake which occupied so many
+of Mr. Wentworth's numerous acres, and of a remarkable pine
+grove which lay upon the further side of it, planted upon
+a steep embankment and haunted by the summer breeze.
+The murmur of the air in the far off tree-tops had
+a strange distinctness; it was almost articulate.
+One afternoon the young man came out of his painting-room
+and passed the open door of Eugenia's little salon.
+Within, in the cool dimness, he saw his sister, dressed in white,
+buried in her arm-chair, and holding to her face an immense bouquet.
+Opposite to her sat Clifford Wentworth, twirling his hat.
+He had evidently just presented the bouquet to the Baroness,
+whose fine eyes, as she glanced at him over the big roses
+and geraniums, wore a conversational smile.  Felix, standing on
+the threshold of the cottage, hesitated for a moment as to
+whether he should retrace his steps and enter the parlor.
+Then he went his way and passed into Mr. Wentworth's garden.
+That civilizing process to which he had suggested that Clifford
+should be subjected appeared to have come on of itself.
+Felix was very sure, at least, that Mr. Wentworth had not
+adopted his ingenious device for stimulating the young man's
+aesthetic consciousness.  "Doubtless he supposes," he said
+to himself, after the conversation that has been narrated,
+"that I desire, out of fraternal benevolence, to procure
+for Eugenia the amusement of a flirtation--or, as he probably
+calls it, an intrigue--with the too susceptible Clifford.
+It must be admitted--and I have noticed it before--that nothing
+exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination
+of very rigid people."  Felix, on his own side, had of course
+said nothing to Clifford; but he had observed to Eugenia
+that Mr. Wentworth was much mortified at his son's low tastes.
+"We ought to do something to help them, after all their
+kindness to us," he had added.  "Encourage Clifford to come
+and see you, and inspire him with a taste for conversation.
+That will supplant the other, which only comes from
+his puerility, from his not taking his position in the world--
+that of a rich young man of ancient stock--seriously enough.
+Make him a little more serious.  Even if he makes love to you
+it is no great matter."
+
+"I am to offer myself as a superior form of intoxication--
+a substitute for a brandy bottle, eh?" asked the Baroness.
+"Truly, in this country one comes to strange uses."
+
+But she had not positively declined to undertake Clifford's
+higher education, and Felix, who had not thought of the matter
+again, being haunted with visions of more personal profit,
+now reflected that the work of redemption had fairly begun.
+The idea in prospect had seemed of the happiest, but in operation
+it made him a trifle uneasy.  "What if Eugenia--what if Eugenia"--
+he asked himself softly; the question dying away in his sense of
+Eugenia's undetermined capacity.  But before Felix had time either
+to accept or to reject its admonition, even in this vague form,
+he saw Robert Acton turn out of Mr. Wentworth's inclosure,
+by a distant gate, and come toward the cottage in the orchard.
+Acton had evidently walked from his own house along a shady
+by-way and was intending to pay a visit to Madame Munster.
+Felix watched him a moment; then he turned away.
+Acton could be left to play the part of Providence and interrupt--
+if interruption were needed--Clifford's entanglement with Eugenia.
+
+Felix passed through the garden toward the house and
+toward a postern gate which opened upon a path leading
+across the fields, beside a little wood, to the lake.
+He stopped and looked up at the house; his eyes rested more
+particularly upon a certain open window, on the shady side.
+Presently Gertrude appeared there, looking out into the summer light.
+He took off his hat to her and bade her good-day;
+he remarked that he was going to row across the pond,
+and begged that she would do him the honor to accompany him.
+She looked at him a moment; then, without saying anything,
+she turned away.  But she soon reappeared below in one of those
+quaint and charming Leghorn hats, tied with white satin bows,
+that were worn at that period; she also carried a green parasol.
+She went with him to the edge of the lake, where a couple of
+boats were always moored; they got into one of them, and Felix,
+with gentle strokes, propelled it to the opposite shore.
+The day was the perfection of summer weather; the little lake was
+the color of sunshine; the plash of the oars was the only sound,
+and they found themselves listening to it.  They disembarked, and,
+by a winding path, ascended the pine-crested mound which overlooked
+the water, whose white expanse glittered between the trees.
+The place was delightfully cool, and had the added charm that--
+in the softly sounding pine boughs--you seemed to hear
+the coolness as well as feel it.  Felix and Gertrude sat down on
+the rust-colored carpet of pine-needles and talked of many things.
+Felix spoke at last, in the course of talk, of his going away;
+it was the first time he had alluded to it.
+
+"You are going away?" said Gertrude, looking at him.
+
+"Some day--when the leaves begin to fall.  You know I can't stay forever."
+
+Gertrude transferred her eyes to the outer prospect, and then,
+after a pause, she said, "I shall never see you again."
+
+"Why not?" asked Felix.  "We shall probably both survive my departure."
+
+But Gertrude only repeated, "I shall never see you again.
+I shall never hear of you," she went on.  "I shall know nothing about you.
+I knew nothing about you before, and it will be the same again."
+
+"I knew nothing about you then, unfortunately," said Felix.
+"But now I shall write to you."
+
+"Don't write to me.  I shall not answer you," Gertrude declared.
+
+"I should of course burn your letters," said Felix.
+
+Gertrude looked at him again.  "Burn my letters?
+You sometimes say strange things."
+
+"They are not strange in themselves," the young man answered.
+"They are only strange as said to you.  You will come to Europe."
+
+"With whom shall I come?"  She asked this question simply;
+she was very much in earnest.  Felix was interested in her earnestness;
+for some moments he hesitated.  "You can't tell me that," she pursued.
+"You can't say that I shall go with my father and my sister;
+you don't believe that."
+
+"I shall keep your letters," said Felix, presently, for all answer.
+
+"I never write.  I don't know how to write."  Gertrude, for some time,
+said nothing more; and her companion, as he looked at her, wished it
+had not been "disloyal" to make love to the daughter of an old gentleman
+who had offered one hospitality.  The afternoon waned; the shadows
+stretched themselves; and the light grew deeper in the western sky.
+Two persons appeared on the opposite side of the lake, coming from the house
+and crossing the meadow.  "It is Charlotte and Mr. Brand," said Gertrude.
+"They are coming over here."  But Charlotte and Mr. Brand only came
+down to the edge of the water, and stood there, looking across;
+they made no motion to enter the boat that Felix had left at the
+mooring-place. Felix waved his hat to them; it was too far to call.
+They made no visible response, and they presently turned away and walked
+along the shore.
+
+"Mr. Brand is not demonstrative," said Felix.  "He is never demonstrative
+to me.  He sits silent, with his chin in his hand, looking at me.
+Sometimes he looks away.  Your father tells me he is so eloquent;
+and I should like to hear him talk.  He looks like such a noble young man.
+But with me he will never talk.  And yet I am so fond of listening
+to brilliant imagery!"
+
+"He is very eloquent," said Gertrude; "but he has no brilliant imagery.
+I have heard him talk a great deal.  I knew that when they saw us they
+would not come over here."
+
+"Ah, he is making la cour, as they say, to your sister?
+They desire to be alone?"
+
+"No," said Gertrude, gravely, "they have no such reason
+as that for being alone."
+
+"But why does n't he make la cour to Charlotte?"  Felix inquired.
+"She is so pretty, so gentle, so good."
+
+Gertrude glanced at him, and then she looked at the distantly-seen couple
+they were discussing.  Mr. Brand and Charlotte were walking side by side.
+They might have been a pair of lovers, and yet they might not.
+"They think I should not be here," said Gertrude.
+
+"With me?  I thought you did n't have those ideas."
+
+"You don't understand.  There are a great many things you don't understand."
+
+"I understand my stupidity.  But why, then, do not Charlotte and Mr. Brand,
+who, as an elder sister and a clergyman, are free to walk about together,
+come over and make me wiser by breaking up the unlawful interview into which I
+have lured you?"
+
+"That is the last thing they would do," said Gertrude.
+
+Felix stared at her a moment, with his lifted eyebrows.
+"Je n'y comprends rien!" he exclaimed; then his eyes followed
+for a while the retreating figures of this critical pair.
+"You may say what you please," he declared; "it is evident to me
+that your sister is not indifferent to her clever companion.
+It is agreeable to her to be walking there with him.
+I can see that from here."  And in the excitement of observation
+Felix rose to his feet.
+
+Gertrude rose also, but she made no attempt to emulate her
+companion's discovery; she looked rather in another direction.
+Felix's words had struck her; but a certain delicacy checked her.
+"She is certainly not indifferent to Mr. Brand; she has the highest
+opinion of him."
+
+"One can see it--one can see it," said Felix, in a tone
+of amused contemplation, with his head on one side.
+Gertrude turned her back to the opposite shore; it was disagreeable
+to her to look, but she hoped Felix would say something more.
+"Ah, they have wandered away into the wood," he added.
+
+Gertrude turned round again.  "She is not in love with him," she said;
+it seemed her duty to say that.
+
+"Then he is in love with her; or if he is not, he ought to be.
+She is such a perfect little woman of her kind.  She reminds
+me of a pair of old-fashioned silver sugar-tongs; you know I
+am very fond of sugar.  And she is very nice with Mr. Brand;
+I have noticed that; very gentle and gracious."
+
+Gertrude reflected a moment.  Then she took a great resolution.
+"She wants him to marry me," she said.  "So of course she is nice."
+
+Felix's eyebrows rose higher than ever.  "To marry you!
+Ah, ah, this is interesting.  And you think one must be very nice
+with a man to induce him to do that?"
+
+Gertrude had turned a little pale, but she went on, "Mr. Brand
+wants it himself."
+
+Felix folded his arms and stood looking at her.  "I see--I see,"
+he said quickly.  "Why did you never tell me this before?"
+
+"It is disagreeable to me to speak of it even now.
+I wished simply to explain to you about Charlotte."
+
+"You don't wish to marry Mr. Brand, then?"
+
+"No," said Gertrude, gravely.
+
+"And does your father wish it?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+"And you don't like him--you have refused him?"
+
+"I don't wish to marry him."
+
+"Your father and sister think you ought to, eh?"
+
+"It is a long story," said Gertrude.  "They think there are good reasons.
+I can't explain it.  They think I have obligations, and that I
+have encouraged him."
+
+Felix smiled at her, as if she had been telling him an amusing story
+about some one else.  "I can't tell you how this interests me," he said.
+"Now you don't recognize these reasons--these obligations?"
+
+"I am not sure; it is not easy."  And she picked up her parasol
+and turned away, as if to descend the slope.
+
+"Tell me this," Felix went on, going with her:  "are you likely to give in--
+to let them persuade you?"
+
+Gertrude looked at him with the serious face that she had
+constantly worn, in opposition to his almost eager smile.
+"I shall never marry Mr. Brand," she said.
+
+"I see!"  Felix rejoined.  And they slowly descended the hill together,
+saying nothing till they reached the margin of the pond.  "It is your
+own affair," he then resumed; "but do you know, I am not altogether glad?
+If it were settled that you were to marry Mr. Brand I should take
+a certain comfort in the arrangement.  I should feel more free.
+I have no right to make love to you myself, eh?"  And he paused,
+lightly pressing his argument upon her.
+
+"None whatever," replied Gertrude quickly--too quickly.
+
+"Your father would never hear of it; I have n't a penny.
+Mr. Brand, of course, has property of his own, eh?"
+
+"I believe he has some property; but that has nothing to do with it."
+
+"With you, of course not; but with your father and sister it must have.
+So, as I say, if this were settled, I should feel more at liberty.  "
+
+"More at liberty?"  Gertrude repeated.  "Please unfasten the boat."
+
+Felix untwisted the rope and stood holding it.
+"I should be able to say things to you that I can't
+give myself the pleasure of saying now," he went on.
+"I could tell you how much I admire you, without seeming
+to pretend to that which I have no right to pretend to.
+I should make violent love to you," he added, laughing, "if I
+thought you were so placed as not to be offended by it."
+
+"You mean if I were engaged to another man?  That is strange reasoning!"
+Gertrude exclaimed.
+
+"In that case you would not take me seriously."
+
+"I take every one seriously," said Gertrude.  And without his help she
+stepped lightly into the boat.
+
+Felix took up the oars and sent it forward.  "Ah, this is what you have
+been thinking about?  It seemed to me you had something on your mind.
+I wish very much," he added, "that you would tell me some of these
+so-called reasons--these obligations."
+
+"They are not real reasons--good reasons," said Gertrude,
+looking at the pink and yellow gleams in the water.
+
+"I can understand that!  Because a handsome girl has had a spark of coquetry,
+that is no reason."
+
+"If you mean me, it 's not that.  I have not done that."
+
+"It is something that troubles you, at any rate," said Felix.
+
+"Not so much as it used to," Gertrude rejoined.
+
+He looked at her, smiling always.  "That is not saying much, eh?"
+But she only rested her eyes, very gravely, on the lighted water.
+She seemed to him to be trying to hide the signs of the trouble of
+which she had just told him.  Felix felt, at all times, much the same
+impulse to dissipate visible melancholy that a good housewife feels
+to brush away dust.  There was something he wished to brush away now;
+suddenly he stopped rowing and poised his oars.  "Why should Mr. Brand
+have addressed himself to you, and not to your sister?" he asked.
+"I am sure she would listen to him."
+
+Gertrude, in her family, was thought capable of a good deal
+of levity; but her levity had never gone so far as this.
+It moved her greatly, however, to hear Felix say that he was
+sure of something; so that, raising her eyes toward him,
+she tried intently, for some moments, to conjure up this wonderful
+image of a love-affair between her own sister and her own suitor.
+We know that Gertrude had an imaginative mind; so that it is not
+impossible that this effort should have been partially successful.
+But she only murmured, "Ah, Felix! ah, Felix!"
+
+"Why should n't they marry?  Try and make them marry!" cried Felix.
+
+"Try and make them?"
+
+"Turn the tables on them.  Then they will leave you alone.
+I will help you as far as I can."
+
+Gertrude's heart began to beat; she was greatly excited;
+she had never had anything so interesting proposed to her before.
+Felix had begun to row again, and he now sent the boat home
+with long strokes.  "I believe she does care for him!"
+said Gertrude, after they had disembarked.
+
+"Of course she does, and we will marry them off.
+It will make them happy; it will make every one happy.
+We shall have a wedding and I will write an epithalamium."
+
+"It seems as if it would make me happy," said Gertrude.
+
+"To get rid of Mr. Brand, eh?  To recover your liberty?"
+
+Gertrude walked on.  "To see my sister married to so good a man."
+
+Felix gave his light laugh.  "You always put things on
+those grounds; you will never say anything for yourself.
+You are all so afraid, here, of being selfish.
+I don't think you know how," he went on.  "Let me show you!
+It will make me happy for myself, and for just the reverse
+of what I told you a while ago.  After that, when I make love
+to you, you will have to think I mean it."
+
+"I shall never think you mean anything," said Gertrude.
+"You are too fantastic."
+
+"Ah," cried Felix, "that 's a license to say everything!
+Gertrude, I adore you!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Charlotte and Mr. Brand had not returned when they reached
+the house; but the Baroness had come to tea, and Robert
+Acton also, who now regularly asked for a place at this
+generous repast or made his appearance later in the evening.
+Clifford Wentworth, with his juvenile growl, remarked upon it.
+
+"You are always coming to tea nowadays, Robert," he said.
+"I should think you had drunk enough tea in China."
+
+"Since when is Mr. Acton more frequent?" asked the Baroness.
+
+"Since you came," said Clifford.  "It seems as if you were
+a kind of attraction."
+
+"I suppose I am a curiosity," said the Baroness.
+"Give me time and I will make you a salon."
+
+"It would fall to pieces after you go!" exclaimed Acton.
+
+"Don't talk about her going, in that familiar way," Clifford said.
+"It makes me feel gloomy."
+
+Mr. Wentworth glanced at his son, and taking note of these words,
+wondered if Felix had been teaching him, according to the programme
+he had sketched out, to make love to the wife of a German prince.
+
+Charlotte came in late with Mr. Brand; but Gertrude, to whom,
+at least, Felix had taught something, looked in vain, in her face,
+for the traces of a guilty passion.  Mr. Brand sat down by Gertrude,
+and she presently asked him why they had not crossed the pond
+to join Felix and herself.
+
+"It is cruel of you to ask me that," he answered, very softly.
+He had a large morsel of cake before him; but he fingered it without
+eating it.  "I sometimes think you are growing cruel," he added.
+
+Gertrude said nothing; she was afraid to speak.  There was a kind
+of rage in her heart; she felt as if she could easily persuade herself
+that she was persecuted.  She said to herself that it was quite right
+that she should not allow him to make her believe she was wrong.
+She thought of what Felix had said to her; she wished indeed Mr. Brand
+would marry Charlotte.  She looked away from him and spoke no more.
+Mr. Brand ended by eating his cake, while Felix sat opposite,
+describing to Mr. Wentworth the students' duels at Heidelberg.
+After tea they all dispersed themselves, as usual, upon the piazza
+and in the garden; and Mr. Brand drew near to Gertrude again.
+
+"I did n't come to you this afternoon because you were not alone,"
+he began; "because you were with a newer friend."
+
+"Felix?  He is an old friend by this time."
+
+Mr. Brand looked at the ground for some moments.  "I thought
+I was prepared to hear you speak in that way," he resumed.
+"But I find it very painful."
+
+"I don't see what else I can say," said Gertrude.
+
+Mr. Brand walked beside her for a while in silence; Gertrude wished
+he would go away.  "He is certainly very accomplished.
+But I think I ought to advise you."
+
+"To advise me?"
+
+"I think I know your nature."
+
+"I think you don't," said Gertrude, with a soft laugh.
+
+"You make yourself out worse than you are--to please him,"
+Mr. Brand said, gently.
+
+"Worse--to please him?  What do you mean?" asked Gertrude, stopping.
+
+Mr. Brand stopped also, and with the same soft straight-forwardness, "He does
+n't care for the things you care for--the great questions of life."
+
+Gertrude, with her eyes on his, shook her head.  "I don't care
+for the great questions of life.  They are much beyond me."
+
+"There was a time when you did n't say that," said Mr. Brand.
+
+"Oh," rejoined Gertrude, "I think you made me talk a great deal of nonsense.
+And it depends," she added, "upon what you call the great questions of life.
+There are some things I care for."
+
+"Are they the things you talk about with your cousin?"
+
+"You should not say things to me against my cousin, Mr. Brand,"
+said Gertrude.  "That is dishonorable."
+
+He listened to this respectfully; then he answered, with a little vibration
+of the voice, "I should be very sorry to do anything dishonorable.
+But I don't see why it is dishonorable to say that your cousin is frivolous."
+
+"Go and say it to himself!"
+
+"I think he would admit it," said Mr. Brand.  "That is the tone
+he would take.  He would not be ashamed of it."
+
+"Then I am not ashamed of it!"  Gertrude declared.
+"That is probably what I like him for.  I am frivolous myself."
+
+"You are trying, as I said just now, to lower yourself."
+
+"I am trying for once to be natural!" cried Gertrude passionately.
+"I have been pretending, all my life; I have been dishonest;
+it is you that have made me so!"  Mr. Brand stood gazing at her,
+and she went on, "Why should n't I be frivolous, if I want?
+One has a right to be frivolous, if it 's one's nature.  No, I don't
+care for the great questions.  I care for pleasure--for amusement.
+Perhaps I am fond of wicked things; it is very possible!"
+
+Mr. Brand remained staring; he was even a little pale,
+as if he had been frightened.  "I don't think you know what you
+are saying!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Perhaps not.  Perhaps I am talking nonsense.  But it is only with you
+that I talk nonsense.  I never do so with my cousin."
+
+"I will speak to you again, when you are less excited,"
+said Mr. Brand.
+
+"I am always excited when you speak to me.  I must tell you that--
+even if it prevents you altogether, in future.  Your speaking
+to me irritates me.  With my cousin it is very different.
+That seems quiet and natural."
+
+He looked at her, and then he looked away, with a kind of
+helpless distress, at the dusky garden and the faint summer stars.
+After which, suddenly turning back, "Gertrude, Gertrude!"
+he softly groaned.  "Am I really losing you?"
+
+She was touched--she was pained; but it had already occurred
+to her that she might do something better than say so.
+It would not have alleviated her companion's distress to perceive,
+just then, whence she had sympathetically borrowed this ingenuity.
+"I am not sorry for you," Gertrude said; "for in paying so much attention
+to me you are following a shadow--you are wasting something precious.
+There is something else you might have that you don't look at--
+something better than I am.  That is a reality!"  And then,
+with intention, she looked at him and tried to smile a little.
+He thought this smile of hers very strange; but she turned away
+and left him.
+
+She wandered about alone in the garden wondering what Mr. Brand
+would make of her words, which it had been a singular pleasure
+for her to utter.  Shortly after, passing in front of the house,
+she saw at a distance two persons standing near the garden gate.
+It was Mr. Brand going away and bidding good-night to Charlotte,
+who had walked down with him from the house.  Gertrude saw that
+the parting was prolonged.  Then she turned her back upon it.
+She had not gone very far, however, when she heard her
+sister slowly following her.  She neither turned round nor
+waited for her; she knew what Charlotte was going to say.
+Charlotte, who at last overtook her, in fact presently began;
+she had passed her arm into Gertrude's.
+
+"Will you listen to me, dear, if I say something very particular?"
+
+"I know what you are going to say," said Gertrude.
+"Mr. Brand feels very badly."
+
+"Oh, Gertrude, how can you treat him so?"  Charlotte demanded.
+And as her sister made no answer she added, "After all he has
+done for you!"
+
+"What has he done for me?"
+
+"I wonder you can ask, Gertrude.  He has helped you so.
+You told me so yourself, a great many times.  You told me
+that he helped you to struggle with your--your peculiarities.
+You told me that he had taught you how to govern your temper."
+
+For a moment Gertrude said nothing.  Then, "Was my temper
+very bad?" she asked.
+
+"I am not accusing you, Gertrude," said Charlotte.
+
+"What are you doing, then?" her sister demanded, with a short laugh.
+
+"I am pleading for Mr. Brand--reminding you of all you owe him."
+
+"I have given it all back," said Gertrude, still with her little laugh.
+"He can take back the virtue he imparted!  I want to be wicked again."
+
+Her sister made her stop in the path, and fixed upon her,
+in the darkness, a sweet, reproachful gaze.  "If you talk this
+way I shall almost believe it.  Think of all we owe Mr. Brand.
+Think of how he has always expected something of you.
+Think how much he has been to us.  Think of his beautiful
+influence upon Clifford."
+
+"He is very good," said Gertrude, looking at her sister.
+"I know he is very good.  But he should n't speak against Felix."
+
+"Felix is good," Charlotte answered, softly but promptly.  "Felix is
+very wonderful.  Only he is so different.  Mr. Brand is much nearer to us.
+I should never think of going to Felix with a trouble--with a question.
+Mr. Brand is much more to us, Gertrude."
+
+"He is very--very good," Gertrude repeated.  "He is more
+to you; yes, much more.  Charlotte," she added suddenly,
+"you are in love with him!"
+
+"Oh, Gertrude!" cried poor Charlotte; and her sister saw her blushing
+in the darkness.
+
+Gertrude put her arm round her.  "I wish he would marry you!"
+she went on.
+
+Charlotte shook herself free.  "You must not say such things!"
+she exclaimed, beneath her breath.
+
+"You like him more than you say, and he likes you more than he knows."
+
+"This is very cruel of you!"  Charlotte Wentworth murmured.
+
+But if it was cruel Gertrude continued pitiless.  "Not if it 's true,"
+she answered.  "I wish he would marry you."
+
+"Please don't say that."
+
+"I mean to tell him so!" said Gertrude.
+
+"Oh, Gertrude, Gertrude!" her sister almost moaned.
+
+"Yes, if he speaks to me again about myself.  I will say,
+'Why don't you marry Charlotte?  She 's a thousand times better
+than I.' "
+
+"You are wicked; you are changed!" cried her sister.
+
+"If you don't like it you can prevent it," said Gertrude.
+"You can prevent it by keeping him from speaking to me!"
+And with this she walked away, very conscious of what she had done;
+measuring it and finding a certain joy and a quickened sense
+of freedom in it.
+
+Mr. Wentworth was rather wide of the mark in suspecting
+that Clifford had begun to pay unscrupulous compliments
+to his brilliant cousin; for the young man had really
+more scruples than he received credit for in his family.
+He had a certain transparent shamefacedness which was in
+itself a proof that he was not at his ease in dissipation.
+His collegiate peccadilloes had aroused a domestic murmur
+as disagreeable to the young man as the creaking of his boots
+would have been to a house-breaker. Only, as the house-breaker
+would have simplified matters by removing his chaussures,
+it had seemed to Clifford that the shortest cut to comfortable
+relations with people--relations which should make him cease to
+think that when they spoke to him they meant something improving--
+was to renounce all ambition toward a nefarious development.
+And, in fact, Clifford's ambition took the most commendable form.
+He thought of himself in the future as the well-known and much-liked
+Mr. Wentworth, of Boston, who should, in the natural course
+of prosperity, have married his pretty cousin, Lizzie Acton;
+should live in a wide-fronted house, in view of the Common;
+and should drive, behind a light wagon, over the damp
+autumn roads, a pair of beautifully matched sorrel horses.
+Clifford's vision of the coming years was very simple;
+its most definite features were this element of familiar
+matrimony and the duplication of his resources for trotting.
+He had not yet asked his cousin to marry him;
+but he meant to do so as soon as he had taken his degree.
+Lizzie was serenely conscious of his intention,
+and she had made up her mind that he would improve.
+Her brother, who was very fond of this light, quick, competent
+little Lizzie, saw on his side no reason to interpose.
+It seemed to him a graceful social law that Clifford and his
+sister should become engaged; he himself was not engaged,
+but every one else, fortunately, was not such a fool as he.
+He was fond of Clifford, as well, and had his own way--
+of which it must be confessed he was a little ashamed--
+of looking at those aberrations which had led to the young man's
+compulsory retirement from the neighboring seat of learning.
+Acton had seen the world, as he said to himself; he had been
+to China and had knocked about among men.  He had learned
+the essential difference between a nice young fellow and a mean
+young fellow, and was satisfied that there was no harm in Clifford.
+He believed--although it must be added that he had not quite
+the courage to declare it--in the doctrine of wild oats,
+and thought it a useful preventive of superfluous fears.
+If Mr. Wentworth and Charlotte and Mr. Brand would
+only apply it in Clifford's case, they would be happier;
+and Acton thought it a pity they should not be happier.
+They took the boy's misdemeanors too much to heart; they talked
+to him too solemnly; they frightened and bewildered him.
+Of course there was the great standard of morality, which forbade
+that a man should get tipsy, play at billiards for money,
+or cultivate his sensual consciousness; but what fear was there
+that poor Clifford was going to run a tilt at any great standard?
+It had, however, never occurred to Acton to dedicate the Baroness
+Munster to the redemption of a refractory collegian.
+The instrument, here, would have seemed to him quite too complex
+for the operation.  Felix, on the other hand, had spoken
+in obedience to the belief that the more charming a woman is
+the more numerous, literally, are her definite social uses.
+
+Eugenia herself, as we know, had plenty of leisure to enumerate her uses.
+As I have had the honor of intimating, she had come four thousand
+miles to seek her fortune; and it is not to be supposed that after
+this great effort she could neglect any apparent aid to advancement.
+It is my misfortune that in attempting to describe in a short compass
+the deportment of this remarkable woman I am obliged to express
+things rather brutally.  I feel this to be the case, for instance,
+when I say that she had primarily detected such an aid to advancement
+in the person of Robert Acton, but that she had afterwards
+remembered that a prudent archer has always a second bowstring.
+Eugenia was a woman of finely-mingled motive, and her intentions
+were never sensibly gross.  She had a sort of aesthetic ideal
+for Clifford which seemed to her a disinterested reason for
+taking him in hand.  It was very well for a fresh-colored young
+gentleman to be ingenuous; but Clifford, really, was crude.
+With such a pretty face he ought to have prettier manners.
+She would teach him that, with a beautiful name, the expectation
+of a large property, and, as they said in Europe, a social position,
+an only son should know how to carry himself.
+
+Once Clifford had begun to come and see her by himself and
+for himself, he came very often.  He hardly knew why he should come;
+he saw her almost every evening at his father's house;
+he had nothing particular to say to her.  She was not a young girl,
+and fellows of his age called only upon young girls.
+He exaggerated her age; she seemed to him an old woman;
+it was happy that the Baroness, with all her intelligence,
+was incapable of guessing this.  But gradually it struck Clifford
+that visiting old women might be, if not a natural, at least,
+as they say of some articles of diet, an acquired taste.
+The Baroness was certainly a very amusing old woman;
+she talked to him as no lady--and indeed no gentleman--
+had ever talked to him before.
+
+"You should go to Europe and make the tour," she said to him one afternoon.
+"Of course, on leaving college you will go."
+
+"I don't want to go," Clifford declared.  "I know some fellows who have been
+to Europe.  They say you can have better fun here."
+
+"That depends.  It depends upon your idea of fun.
+Your friends probably were not introduced."
+
+"Introduced?"  Clifford demanded.
+
+"They had no opportunity of going into society; they formed no relations."
+This was one of a certain number of words that the Baroness often pronounced
+in the French manner.
+
+"They went to a ball, in Paris; I know that," said Clifford.
+
+"Ah, there are balls and balls; especially in Paris.  No, you must go,
+you know; it is not a thing from which you can dispense yourself.
+You need it."
+
+"Oh, I 'm very well," said Clifford.  "I 'm not sick."
+
+"I don't mean for your health, my poor child.  I mean for your manners.  "
+
+"I have n't got any manners!" growled Clifford.
+
+"Precisely.  You don't mind my assenting to that, eh?" asked the Baroness
+with a smile.  "You must go to Europe and get a few.  You can get them
+better there.  It is a pity you might not have come while I was living in--
+in Germany.  I would have introduced you; I had a charming little circle.
+You would perhaps have been rather young; but the younger one begins,
+I think, the better.  Now, at any rate, you have no time to lose,
+and when I return you must immediately come to me."
+
+All this, to Clifford's apprehension, was a great mixture--
+his beginning young, Eugenia's return to Europe,
+his being introduced to her charming little circle.
+What was he to begin, and what was her little circle?
+His ideas about her marriage had a good deal of vagueness;
+but they were in so far definite as that he felt it to be a matter
+not to be freely mentioned.  He sat and looked all round the room;
+he supposed she was alluding in some way to her marriage.
+
+"Oh, I don't want to go to Germany," he said; it seemed to him
+the most convenient thing to say.
+
+She looked at him a while, smiling with her lips, but not with her eyes.
+
+"You have scruples?" she asked.
+
+"Scruples?" said Clifford.
+
+"You young people, here, are very singular; one does n't know
+where to expect you.  When you are not extremely improper
+you are so terribly proper.  I dare say you think that,
+owing to my irregular marriage, I live with loose people.
+You were never more mistaken.  I have been all the more particular."
+
+"Oh, no," said Clifford, honestly distressed.  "I never thought
+such a thing as that."
+
+"Are you very sure?  I am convinced that your father does,
+and your sisters.  They say to each other that here I am on my
+good behavior, but that over there--married by the left hand--
+I associate with light women.  "
+
+"Oh, no," cried Clifford, energetically, "they don't say such things
+as that to each other!"
+
+"If they think them they had better say them," the Baroness rejoined.
+"Then they can be contradicted.  Please contradict that whenever you hear it,
+and don't be afraid of coming to see me on account of the company I keep.
+I have the honor of knowing more distinguished men, my poor child,
+than you are likely to see in a life-time. I see very few women; but those
+are women of rank.  So, my dear young Puritan, you need n't be afraid.
+I am not in the least one of those who think that the society of women who
+have lost their place in the vrai monde is necessary to form a young man.
+I have never taken that tone.  I have kept my place myself, and I think we are
+a much better school than the others.  Trust me, Clifford, and I will prove
+that to you," the Baroness continued, while she made the agreeable reflection
+that she could not, at least, be accused of perverting her young kinsman.
+"So if you ever fall among thieves don't go about saying I sent you to them."
+
+Clifford thought it so comical that he should know--in spite of her
+figurative language--what she meant, and that she should mean what he knew,
+that he could hardly help laughing a little, although he tried hard.
+"Oh, no! oh, no!" he murmured.
+
+"Laugh out, laugh out, if I amuse you!" cried the Baroness.
+"I am here for that!"  And Clifford thought her a very amusing person indeed.
+"But remember," she said on this occasion, "that you are coming--next year--
+to pay me a visit over there."
+
+About a week afterwards she said to him, point-blank, "Are you seriously
+making love to your little cousin?"
+
+"Seriously making love"--these words, on Madame Munster's lips,
+had to Clifford's sense a portentous and embarrassing sound; he hesitated
+about assenting, lest he should commit himself to more than he understood.
+"Well, I should n't say it if I was!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Why would n't you say it?" the Baroness demanded.
+"Those things ought to be known."
+
+"I don't care whether it is known or not," Clifford rejoined.
+"But I don't want people looking at me."
+
+"A young man of your importance ought to learn to bear observation--
+to carry himself as if he were quite indifferent to it.
+I won't say, exactly, unconscious," the Baroness explained.
+"No, he must seem to know he is observed, and to think it
+natural he should be; but he must appear perfectly used to it.
+Now you have n't that, Clifford; you have n't that at all.
+You must have that, you know.  Don't tell me you are not a
+young man of importance," Eugenia added.  "Don't say anything
+so flat as that."
+
+"Oh, no, you don't catch me saying that!" cried Clifford.
+
+"Yes, you must come to Germany," Madame Munster continued.
+"I will show you how people can be talked about, and yet not
+seem to know it.  You will be talked about, of course, with me;
+it will be said you are my lover.  I will show you how little
+one may mind that--how little I shall mind it."
+
+Clifford sat staring, blushing and laughing.  "I shall mind
+it a good deal!" he declared.
+
+"Ah, not too much, you know; that would be uncivil.
+But I give you leave to mind it a little; especially if you
+have a passion for Miss Acton.  Voyons; as regards that,
+you either have or you have not.  It is very simple to say it."
+
+"I don't see why you want to know," said Clifford.
+
+"You ought to want me to know.  If one is arranging a marriage,
+one tells one's friends."
+
+"Oh, I 'm not arranging anything," said Clifford.
+
+"You don't intend to marry your cousin?"
+
+"Well, I expect I shall do as I choose!"
+
+The Baroness leaned her head upon the back of her chair and closed
+her eyes, as if she were tired.  Then opening them again,
+"Your cousin is very charming!" she said.
+
+"She is the prettiest girl in this place," Clifford rejoined.
+
+" 'In this place' is saying little; she would be charming anywhere.
+I am afraid you are entangled."
+
+"Oh, no, I 'm not entangled."
+
+"Are you engaged?  At your age that is the same thing."
+
+Clifford looked at the Baroness with some audacity.
+"Will you tell no one?"
+
+"If it 's as sacred as that--no."
+
+"Well, then--we are not!" said Clifford.
+
+"That 's the great secret--that you are not, eh?" asked the Baroness,
+with a quick laugh.  "I am very glad to hear it.  You are altogether
+too young.  A young man in your position must choose and compare;
+he must see the world first.  Depend upon it," she added, "you should not
+settle that matter before you have come abroad and paid me that visit.
+There are several things I should like to call your attention to first."
+
+"Well, I am rather afraid of that visit," said Clifford.
+"It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again."
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment.
+
+"My dear child," she said, "there is no agreeable man who has not,
+at some moment, been to school to a clever woman--probably a little
+older than himself.  And you must be thankful when you get your
+instructions gratis.  With me you would get it gratis."
+
+The next day Clifford told Lizzie Acton that the Baroness thought
+her the most charming girl she had ever seen.
+
+Lizzie shook her head.  "No, she does n't!" she said.
+
+"Do you think everything she says," asked Clifford, "is to be taken
+the opposite way?"
+
+"I think that is!" said Lizzie.
+
+Clifford was going to remark that in this case the Baroness must
+desire greatly to bring about a marriage between Mr. Clifford
+Wentworth and Miss Elizabeth Acton; but he resolved, on the whole,
+to suppress this observation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+It seemed to Robert Acton, after Eugenia had come to his house,
+that something had passed between them which made them
+a good deal more intimate.  It was hard to say exactly what,
+except her telling him that she had taken her resolution
+with regard to the Prince Adolf; for Madame Munster's visit
+had made no difference in their relations.  He came to see
+her very often; but he had come to see her very often before.
+It was agreeable to him to find himself in her little drawing-room;
+but this was not a new discovery.  There was a change, however,
+in this sense:  that if the Baroness had been a great deal
+in Acton's thoughts before, she was now never out of them.
+From the first she had been personally fascinating;
+but the fascination now had become intellectual as well.
+He was constantly pondering her words and motions; they were
+as interesting as the factors in an algebraic problem.
+This is saying a good deal; for Acton was extremely fond
+of mathematics.  He asked himself whether it could be
+that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not;
+hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory
+passion itself.  If this was love, love had been overrated.
+Love was a poetic impulse, and his own state of feeling with regard
+to the Baroness was largely characterized by that eminently
+prosaic sentiment--curiosity.  It was true, as Acton with his
+quietly cogitative habit observed to himself, that curiosity,
+pushed to a given point, might become a romantic passion;
+and he certainly thought enough about this charming woman
+to make him restless and even a little melancholy.  It puzzled
+and vexed him at times to feel that he was not more ardent.
+He was not in the least bent upon remaining a bachelor.
+In his younger years he had been--or he had tried to be--
+of the opinion that it would be a good deal "jollier" not to marry,
+and he had flattered himself that his single condition was something
+of a citadel.  It was a citadel, at all events, of which he had
+long since leveled the outworks.  He had removed the guns from
+the ramparts; he had lowered the draw-bridge across the moat.
+The draw-bridge had swayed lightly under Madame Munster's step;
+why should he not cause it to be raised again, so that she
+might be kept prisoner?  He had an idea that she would become--
+in time at least, and on learning the conveniences of the place
+for making a lady comfortable--a tolerably patient captive.
+But the draw-bridge was never raised, and Acton's brilliant
+visitor was as free to depart as she had been to come.
+It was part of his curiosity to know why the deuce so susceptible
+a man was not in love with so charming a woman.  If her various
+graces were, as I have said, the factors in an algebraic problem,
+the answer to this question was the indispensable unknown quantity.
+The pursuit of the unknown quantity was extremely absorbing;
+for the present it taxed all Acton's faculties.
+
+Toward the middle of August he was obliged to leave home for some days;
+an old friend, with whom he had been associated in China,
+had begged him to come to Newport, where he lay extremely ill.
+His friend got better, and at the end of a week Acton was released.
+I use the word "released" advisedly; for in spite of his attachment
+to his Chinese comrade he had been but a half-hearted visitor.
+He felt as if he had been called away from the theatre during
+the progress of a remarkably interesting drama.  The curtain was
+up all this time, and he was losing the fourth act; that fourth
+act which would have been so essential to a just appreciation
+of the fifth.  In other words, he was thinking about the Baroness,
+who, seen at this distance, seemed a truly brilliant figure.
+He saw at Newport a great many pretty women, who certainly were
+figures as brilliant as beautiful light dresses could make them;
+but though they talked a great deal--and the Baroness's strong point
+was perhaps also her conversation--Madame Munster appeared to lose
+nothing by the comparison.  He wished she had come to Newport too.
+Would it not be possible to make up, as they said, a party for
+visiting the famous watering-place and invite Eugenia to join it?
+It was true that the complete satisfaction would be to spend
+a fortnight at Newport with Eugenia alone.  It would be a great
+pleasure to see her, in society, carry everything before her,
+as he was sure she would do.  When Acton caught himself thinking these
+thoughts he began to walk up and down, with his hands in his pockets,
+frowning a little and looking at the floor.  What did it prove--
+for it certainly proved something--this lively disposition to be "off"
+somewhere with Madame Munster, away from all the rest of them?
+Such a vision, certainly, seemed a refined implication of matrimony,
+after the Baroness should have formally got rid of her informal husband.
+At any rate, Acton, with his characteristic discretion, forbore to
+give expression to whatever else it might imply, and the narrator
+of these incidents is not obliged to be more definite.
+
+He returned home rapidly, and, arriving in the afternoon, lost as little
+time as possible in joining the familiar circle at Mr. Wentworth's.
+On reaching the house, however, he found the piazzas empty.
+The doors and windows were open, and their emptiness was made clear
+by the shafts of lamp-light from the parlors.  Entering the house,
+he found Mr. Wentworth sitting alone in one of these apartments,
+engaged in the perusal of the "North American Review."
+After they had exchanged greetings and his cousin had made
+discreet inquiry about his journey, Acton asked what had become
+of Mr. Wentworth's companions.
+
+"They are scattered about, amusing themselves as usual," said the old man.
+"I saw Charlotte, a short time since, seated, with Mr. Brand,
+upon the piazza.  They were conversing with their customary animation.
+I suppose they have joined her sister, who, for the hundredth time,
+was doing the honors of the garden to her foreign cousin."
+
+"I suppose you mean Felix," said Acton.  And on Mr. Wentworth's assenting,
+he said, "And the others?"
+
+"Your sister has not come this evening.  You must have seen her at home,"
+said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"Yes.  I proposed to her to come.  She declined."
+
+"Lizzie, I suppose, was expecting a visitor," said the old man,
+with a kind of solemn slyness.
+
+"If she was expecting Clifford, he had not turned up."
+
+Mr. Wentworth, at this intelligence, closed the "North American Review"
+and remarked that he had understood Clifford to say that he was going
+to see his cousin.  Privately, he reflected that if Lizzie Acton had had
+no news of his son, Clifford must have gone to Boston for the evening:
+an unnatural course of a summer night, especially when accompanied
+with disingenuous representations.
+
+"You must remember that he has two cousins," said Acton, laughing.
+And then, coming to the point, "If Lizzie is not here," he added,
+"neither apparently is the Baroness."
+
+Mr. Wentworth stared a moment, and remembered that queer proposition
+of Felix's. For a moment he did not know whether it was not to be
+wished that Clifford, after all, might have gone to Boston.
+"The Baroness has not honored us tonight," he said.
+"She has not come over for three days."
+
+"Is she ill?"  Acton asked.
+
+"No; I have been to see her."
+
+"What is the matter with her?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Wentworth, "I infer she has tired of us."
+
+Acton pretended to sit down, but he was restless; he found it
+impossible to talk with Mr. Wentworth.  At the end of ten minutes
+he took up his hat and said that he thought he would "go off."
+It was very late; it was ten o'clock.
+
+His quiet-faced kinsman looked at him a moment.
+"Are you going home?" he asked.
+
+Acton hesitated, and then answered that he had proposed to go over and take
+a look at the Baroness.
+
+"Well, you are honest, at least," said Mr. Wentworth, sadly.
+
+"So are you, if you come to that!" cried Acton, laughing.
+"Why should n't I be honest?"
+
+The old man opened the "North American" again, and read a few lines.
+"If we have ever had any virtue among us, we had better keep hold of it now,"
+he said.  He was not quoting.
+
+"We have a Baroness among us," said Acton.  "That 's what we must keep
+hold of!"  He was too impatient to see Madame Munster again to wonder what
+Mr. Wentworth was talking about.  Nevertheless, after he had passed out of
+the house and traversed the garden and the little piece of road that separated
+him from Eugenia's provisional residence, he stopped a moment outside.
+He stood in her little garden; the long window of her parlor was open,
+and he could see the white curtains, with the lamp-light shining
+through them, swaying softly to and fro in the warm night wind.
+There was a sort of excitement in the idea of seeing Madame Munster again;
+he became aware that his heart was beating rather faster than usual.
+It was this that made him stop, with a half-amused surprise.
+But in a moment he went along the piazza, and, approaching the open window,
+tapped upon its lintel with his stick.  He could see the Baroness within;
+she was standing in the middle of the room.  She came to the window
+and pulled aside the curtain; then she stood looking at him a moment.
+She was not smiling; she seemed serious.
+
+"Mais entrez donc!" she said at last.  Acton passed in across the window-sill;
+he wondered, for an instant, what was the matter with her.
+But the next moment she had begun to smile and had put out her hand.
+"Better late than never," she said.  "It is very kind of you to come
+at this hour."
+
+"I have just returned from my journey," said Acton.
+
+"Ah, very kind, very kind," she repeated, looking about her where to sit.
+
+"I went first to the other house," Acton continued.
+"I expected to find you there."
+
+She had sunk into her usual chair; but she got up again, and began to move
+about the room.  Acton had laid down his hat and stick; he was looking at her,
+conscious that there was in fact a great charm in seeing her again.
+"I don't know whether I ought to tell you to sit down," she said.
+"It is too late to begin a visit."
+
+"It 's too early to end one," Acton declared; "and we need
+n't mind the beginning."
+
+She looked at him again, and, after a moment, dropped once
+more into her low chair, while he took a place near her.
+"We are in the middle, then?" she asked.  "Was that where we were
+when you went away?  No, I have n't been to the other house."
+
+"Not yesterday, nor the day before, eh?"
+
+"I don't know how many days it is."
+
+"You are tired of it," said Acton.
+
+She leaned back in her chair; her arms were folded.
+"That is a terrible accusation, but I have not the courage
+to defend myself."
+
+"I am not attacking you," said Acton.  "I expected something
+of this kind."
+
+"It 's a proof of extreme intelligence.  I hope you enjoyed your journey."
+
+"Not at all," Acton declared.  "I would much rather have been
+here with you."
+
+"Now you are attacking me," said the Baroness.  "You are contrasting
+my inconstancy with your own fidelity."
+
+"I confess I never get tired of people I like."
+
+"Ah, you are not a poor wicked foreign woman, with irritable
+nerves and a sophisticated mind!"
+
+"Something has happened to you since I went away," said Acton,
+changing his place.
+
+"Your going away--that is what has happened to me."
+
+"Do you mean to say that you have missed me?" he asked.
+
+"If I had meant to say it, it would not be worth your making a note of.
+I am very dishonest and my compliments are worthless."
+
+Acton was silent for some moments.  "You have broken down,"
+he said at last.
+
+Madame Munster left her chair, and began to move about.
+
+"Only for a moment.  I shall pull myself together again."
+
+"You had better not take it too hard.  If you are bored,
+you need n't be afraid to say so--to me at least."
+
+"You should n't say such things as that," the Baroness answered.
+"You should encourage me."
+
+"I admire your patience; that is encouraging."
+
+"You should n't even say that.  When you talk of my patience you
+are disloyal to your own people.  Patience implies suffering;
+and what have I had to suffer?"
+
+"Oh, not hunger, not unkindness, certainly," said Acton, laughing.
+"Nevertheless, we all admire your patience."
+
+"You all detest me!" cried the Baroness, with a sudden vehemence,
+turning her back toward him.
+
+"You make it hard," said Acton, getting up, "for a man to say something
+tender to you."  This evening there was something particularly striking and
+touching about her; an unwonted softness and a look of suppressed emotion.
+He felt himself suddenly appreciating the fact that she had behaved
+very well.  She had come to this quiet corner of the world under
+the weight of a cruel indignity, and she had been so gracefully,
+modestly thankful for the rest she found there.  She had joined
+that simple circle over the way; she had mingled in its plain,
+provincial talk; she had shared its meagre and savorless pleasures.
+She had set herself a task, and she had rigidly performed it.
+She had conformed to the angular conditions of New England life,
+and she had had the tact and pluck to carry it off as if she liked them.
+Acton felt a more downright need than he had ever felt before to tell
+her that he admired her and that she struck him as a very superior woman.
+All along, hitherto, he had been on his guard with her;
+he had been cautious, observant, suspicious.  But now a certain
+light tumult in his blood seemed to tell him that a finer degree
+of confidence in this charming woman would be its own reward.
+"We don't detest you," he went on.  "I don't know what you mean.
+At any rate, I speak for myself; I don't know anything about the others.
+Very likely, you detest them for the dull life they make you lead.
+Really, it would give me a sort of pleasure to hear you say so."
+
+Eugenia had been looking at the door on the other side of the room;
+now she slowly turned her eyes toward Robert Acton.
+"What can be the motive," she asked, "of a man like you--
+an honest man, a galant homme--in saying so base a thing as that?"
+
+"Does it sound very base?" asked Acton, candidly.
+"I suppose it does, and I thank you for telling me so.
+Of course, I don't mean it literally."
+
+The Baroness stood looking at him.  "How do you mean it?" she asked.
+
+This question was difficult to answer, and Acton, feeling the
+least bit foolish, walked to the open window and looked out.
+He stood there, thinking a moment, and then he turned back.
+"You know that document that you were to send to Germany," he said.
+"You called it your 'renunciation.'  Did you ever send it?"
+
+Madame Munster's eyes expanded; she looked very grave.
+"What a singular answer to my question!"
+
+"Oh, it is n't an answer," said Acton.  "I have wished to ask you,
+many times.  I thought it probable you would tell me yourself.
+The question, on my part, seems abrupt now; but it would be abrupt
+at any time."
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment; and then, "I think I have told
+you too much!" she said.
+
+This declaration appeared to Acton to have a certain force;
+he had indeed a sense of asking more of her than he offered her.
+He returned to the window, and watched, for a moment,
+a little star that twinkled through the lattice of the piazza.
+There were at any rate offers enough he could make;
+perhaps he had hitherto not been sufficiently explicit in doing so.
+"I wish you would ask something of me," he presently said.
+"Is there nothing I can do for you?  If you can't stand this
+dull life any more, let me amuse you!"
+
+The Baroness had sunk once more into a chair, and she had taken
+up a fan which she held, with both hands, to her mouth.
+Over the top of the fan her eyes were fixed on him.
+"You are very strange to-night," she said, with a little laugh.
+
+"I will do anything in the world," he rejoined, standing in front of her.
+"Should n't you like to travel about and see something of the country?
+Won't you go to Niagara?  You ought to see Niagara, you know."
+
+"With you, do you mean?"
+
+"I should be delighted to take you."
+
+"You alone?"
+
+Acton looked at her, smiling, and yet with a serious air.
+"Well, yes; we might go alone," he said.
+
+"If you were not what you are," she answered, "I should feel insulted."
+
+"How do you mean--what I am?"
+
+"If you were one of the gentlemen I have been used to all my life.
+If you were not a queer Bostonian."
+
+"If the gentlemen you have been used to have taught you
+to expect insults," said Acton, "I am glad I am what I am.
+You had much better come to Niagara."
+
+"If you wish to 'amuse' me," the Baroness declared, "you need go
+to no further expense.  You amuse me very effectually."
+
+He sat down opposite to her; she still held her fan up to her face,
+with her eyes only showing above it.  There was a moment's silence,
+and then he said, returning to his former question, "Have you sent
+that document to Germany?"
+
+Again there was a moment's silence.  The expressive eyes of Madame M;
+auunster seemed, however, half to break it.
+
+"I will tell you--at Niagara!" she said.
+
+She had hardly spoken when the door at the further end of the room opened--
+the door upon which, some minutes previous, Eugenia had fixed her gaze.
+Clifford Wentworth stood there, blushing and looking rather awkward.
+The Baroness rose, quickly, and Acton, more slowly, did the same.
+Clifford gave him no greeting; he was looking at Eugenia.
+
+"Ah, you were here?" exclaimed Acton.
+
+"He was in Felix's studio," said Madame Munster.
+"He wanted to see his sketches."
+
+Clifford looked at Robert Acton, but said nothing; he only fanned
+himself with his hat.  "You chose a bad moment," said Acton;
+"you had n't much light."
+
+"I had n't any!" said Clifford, laughing.
+
+"Your candle went out?"  Eugenia asked.  "You should have come back
+here and lighted it again."
+
+Clifford looked at her a moment.  "So I have--come back.
+But I have left the candle!"
+
+Eugenia turned away.  "You are very stupid, my poor boy.
+You had better go home."
+
+"Well," said Clifford, "good night!"
+
+"Have n't you a word to throw to a man when he has safely returned
+from a dangerous journey?"  Acton asked.
+
+"How do you do?" said Clifford.  "I thought--I thought you were"--
+and he paused, looking at the Baroness again.
+
+"You thought I was at Newport, eh?  So I was--this morning."
+
+"Good night, clever child!" said Madame Munster, over her shoulder.
+
+Clifford stared at her--not at all like a clever child; and then,
+with one of his little facetious growls, took his departure.
+
+"What is the matter with him?" asked Acton, when he was gone.
+"He seemed rather in a muddle."
+
+Eugenia, who was near the window, glanced out, listening a moment.
+"The matter--the matter"--she answered.  "But you don't say
+such things here."
+
+"If you mean that he had been drinking a little, you can say that."
+
+"He does n't drink any more.  I have cured him.  And in return--
+he 's in love with me."
+
+It was Acton's turn to stare.  He instantly thought of his sister;
+but he said nothing about her.  He began to laugh.
+"I don't wonder at his passion!  But I wonder at his forsaking
+your society for that of your brother's paint-brushes."
+
+Eugenia was silent a little.  "He had not been in the studio.
+I invented that at the moment."
+
+"Invented it?  For what purpose?"
+
+"He has an idea of being romantic.  He has adopted the habit
+of coming to see me at midnight--passing only through the orchard
+and through Felix's painting-room, which has a door opening that way.
+It seems to amuse him," added Eugenia, with a little laugh.
+
+Acton felt more surprise than he confessed to, for this was a new
+view of Clifford, whose irregularities had hitherto been quite
+without the romantic element.  He tried to laugh again, but he felt
+rather too serious, and after a moment's hesitation his seriousness
+explained itself.  "I hope you don't encourage him," he said.
+"He must not be inconstant to poor Lizzie."
+
+"To your sister?"
+
+"You know they are decidedly intimate," said Acton.
+
+"Ah," cried Eugenia, smiling, "has she--has she"--
+
+"I don't know," Acton interrupted, "what she has.
+But I always supposed that Clifford had a desire to make
+himself agreeable to her."
+
+"Ah, par exemple!" the Baroness went on.  "The little monster!
+The next time he becomes sentimental I will him tell that he ought
+to be ashamed of himself."
+
+Acton was silent a moment.  "You had better say nothing about it."
+
+"I had told him as much already, on general grounds,"
+said the Baroness.  "But in this country, you know, the relations
+of young people are so extraordinary that one is quite at sea.
+They are not engaged when you would quite say they ought to be.
+Take Charlotte Wentworth, for instance, and that young ecclesiastic.
+If I were her father I should insist upon his marrying her;
+but it appears to be thought there is no urgency.
+On the other hand, you suddenly learn that a boy of twenty
+and a little girl who is still with her governess--your sister
+has no governess?  Well, then, who is never away from her mamma--
+a young couple, in short, between whom you have noticed nothing
+beyond an exchange of the childish pleasantries characteristic
+of their age, are on the point of setting up as man and wife."
+The Baroness spoke with a certain exaggerated volubility
+which was in contrast with the languid grace that had
+characterized her manner before Clifford made his appearance.
+It seemed to Acton that there was a spark of irritation in her eye--
+a note of irony (as when she spoke of Lizzie being never away
+from her mother) in her voice.  If Madame Munster was irritated,
+Robert Acton was vaguely mystified; she began to move about
+the room again, and he looked at her without saying anything.
+Presently she took out her watch, and, glancing at it,
+declared that it was three o'clock in the morning and that
+he must go.
+
+"I have not been here an hour," he said, "and they are still
+sitting up at the other house.  You can see the lights.
+Your brother has not come in."
+
+"Oh, at the other house," cried Eugenia, "they are terrible people!
+I don't know what they may do over there.  I am a quiet
+little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them.
+One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours--
+especially clever men like you.  So good night!"
+
+Decidedly, the Baroness was incisive; and though Acton bade her good night
+and departed, he was still a good deal mystified.
+
+The next day Clifford Wentworth came to see Lizzie, and Acton, who was at
+home and saw him pass through the garden, took note of the circumstance.
+He had a natural desire to make it tally with Madame M; auunster's account
+of Clifford's disaffection; but his ingenuity, finding itself unequal
+to the task, resolved at last to ask help of the young man's candor.
+He waited till he saw him going away, and then he went out and overtook
+him in the grounds.
+
+"I wish very much you would answer me a question," Acton said.
+"What were you doing, last night, at Madame Munster's?"
+
+Clifford began to laugh and to blush, by no means like a young man
+with a romantic secret.  "What did she tell you?" he asked.
+
+"That is exactly what I don't want to say."
+
+"Well, I want to tell you the same," said Clifford; "and unless I
+know it perhaps I can't."
+
+They had stopped in a garden path; Acton looked hard at his rosy
+young kinsman.  "She said she could n't fancy what had got into you;
+you appeared to have taken a violent dislike to her."
+
+Clifford stared, looking a little alarmed.  "Oh, come,"
+he growled, "you don't mean that!"
+
+"And that when--for common civility's sake--you came occasionally
+to the house you left her alone and spent your time in Felix's studio,
+under pretext of looking at his sketches."
+
+"Oh, come!" growled Clifford, again.
+
+"Did you ever know me to tell an untruth?"
+
+"Yes, lots of them!" said Clifford, seeing an opening,
+out of the discussion, for his sarcastic powers.
+"Well," he presently added, "I thought you were my father."
+
+"You knew some one was there?"
+
+"We heard you coming in."
+
+Acton meditated.  "You had been with the Baroness, then?"
+
+"I was in the parlor.  We heard your step outside.
+I thought it was my father."
+
+"And on that," asked Acton, "you ran away?"
+
+"She told me to go--to go out by the studio."
+
+Acton meditated more intensely; if there had been a chair at hand he would
+have sat down.  "Why should she wish you not to meet your father?"
+
+"Well," said Clifford, "father does n't like to see me there."
+
+Acton looked askance at his companion and forbore to make
+any comment upon this assertion.  "Has he said so," he asked,
+"to the Baroness?"
+
+"Well, I hope not," said Clifford.  "He has n't said so--in so many words--
+to me.  But I know it worries him; and I want to stop worrying him.
+The Baroness knows it, and she wants me to stop, too."
+
+"To stop coming to see her?"
+
+"I don't know about that; but to stop worrying father.
+Eugenia knows everything," Clifford added, with an air
+of knowingness of his own.
+
+"Ah," said Acton, interrogatively, "Eugenia knows everything?"
+
+"She knew it was not father coming in."
+
+"Then why did you go?"
+
+Clifford blushed and laughed afresh.  "Well, I was afraid it was.
+And besides, she told me to go, at any rate."
+
+"Did she think it was I?"  Acton asked.
+
+"She did n't say so."
+
+Again Robert Acton reflected.  "But you did n't go," he presently said;
+"you came back."
+
+"I could n't get out of the studio," Clifford rejoined.
+"The door was locked, and Felix has nailed some planks across
+the lower half of the confounded windows to make the light come
+in from above.  So they were no use.  I waited there a good while,
+and then, suddenly, I felt ashamed.  I did n't want to be hiding
+away from my own father.  I could n't stand it any longer.
+I bolted out, and when I found it was you I was a little flurried.
+But Eugenia carried it off, did n't she?"  Clifford added,
+in the tone of a young humorist whose perception had not been
+permanently clouded by the sense of his own discomfort.
+
+"Beautifully!" said Acton.  "Especially," he continued,
+"when one remembers that you were very imprudent and that she
+must have been a good deal annoyed."
+
+"Oh," cried Clifford, with the indifference of a young man who feels
+that however he may have failed of felicity in behavior he is extremely
+just in his impressions, "Eugenia does n't care for anything!"
+
+Acton hesitated a moment.  "Thank you for telling me this," he said at last.
+And then, laying his hand on Clifford's shoulder, he added, "Tell me one
+thing more:  are you by chance a little in love with the Baroness?"
+
+"No, sir!" said Clifford, almost shaking off his hand.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The first sunday that followed Robert Acton's return from Newport
+witnessed a change in the brilliant weather that had long prevailed.
+The rain began to fall and the day was cold and dreary.
+Mr. Wentworth and his daughters put on overshoes and went to church,
+and Felix Young, without overshoes, went also, holding an umbrella
+over Gertrude.  It is to be feared that, in the whole observance,
+this was the privilege he most highly valued.  The Baroness remained
+at home; she was in neither a cheerful nor a devotional mood.
+She had, however, never been, during her residence in the United
+States, what is called a regular attendant at divine service;
+and on this particular Sunday morning of which I began with speaking
+she stood at the window of her little drawing-room, watching
+the long arm of a rose-tree that was attached to her piazza,
+but a portion of which had disengaged itself, sway to and fro,
+shake and gesticulate, against the dusky drizzle of the sky.
+Every now and then, in a gust of wind, the rose-tree scattered
+a shower of water-drops against the window-pane; it appeared
+to have a kind of human movement--a menacing, warning intention.
+The room was very cold; Madame Munster put on a shawl and walked about.
+Then she determined to have some fire; and summoning her ancient negress,
+the contrast of whose polished ebony and whose crimson turban had been
+at first a source of satisfaction to her, she made arrangements for
+the production of a crackling flame.  This old woman's name was Azarina.
+The Baroness had begun by thinking that there would be a savory wildness
+in her talk, and, for amusement, she had encouraged her to chatter.
+But Azarina was dry and prim; her conversation was anything but African;
+she reminded Eugenia of the tiresome old ladies she met in society.
+She knew, however, how to make a fire; so that after she had laid
+the logs, Eugenia, who was terribly bored, found a quarter of an hour's
+entertainment in sitting and watching them blaze and sputter.
+She had thought it very likely Robert Acton would come and see her;
+she had not met him since that infelicitous evening.
+But the morning waned without his coming; several times she thought
+she heard his step on the piazza; but it was only a window-shutter
+shaking in a rain-gust. The Baroness, since the beginning
+of that episode in her career of which a slight sketch has been
+attempted in these pages, had had many moments of irritation.
+But to-day her irritation had a peculiar keenness;
+it appeared to feed upon itself.  It urged her to do something;
+but it suggested no particularly profitable line of action.
+If she could have done something at the moment, on the spot,
+she would have stepped upon a European steamer and turned her back,
+with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying failure,
+her visit to her American relations.  It is not exactly
+apparent why she should have termed this enterprise a failure,
+inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest distinction
+for which allowance had been made in American institutions.
+Her irritation came, at bottom, from the sense, which, always present,
+had suddenly grown acute, that the social soil on this big,
+vague continent was somehow not adapted for growing those plants whose
+fragrance she especially inclined to inhale and by which she liked
+to see herself surrounded--a species of vegetation for which she
+carried a collection of seedlings, as we may say, in her pocket.
+She found her chief happiness in the sense of exerting a certain
+power and making a certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance
+of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land,
+finds a smooth straight wall of rock when he had counted upon a clean
+firm beach.  Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost its
+prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable.
+"Surely je n'en suis pas la," she said to herself, "that I let
+it make me uncomfortable that a Mr. Robert Acton should n't
+honor me with a visit!"  Yet she was vexed that he had not come;
+and she was vexed at her vexation.
+
+Her brother, at least, came in, stamping in the hall and shaking
+the wet from his coat.  In a moment he entered the room, with a glow
+in his cheek and half-a-dozen rain-drops glistening on his mustache.
+"Ah, you have a fire," he said.
+
+"Les beaux jours sont passes," replied the Baroness.
+
+"Never, never!  They have only begun," Felix declared, planting himself before
+the hearth.  He turned his back to the fire, placed his hands behind him,
+extended his legs and looked away through the window with an expression
+of face which seemed to denote the perception of rose-color even in the tints
+of a wet Sunday.
+
+His sister, from her chair, looked up at him, watching him;
+and what she saw in his face was not grateful to her present mood.
+She was puzzled by many things, but her brother's disposition was a frequent
+source of wonder to her.  I say frequent and not constant, for there
+were long periods during which she gave her attention to other problems.
+Sometimes she had said to herself that his happy temper, his eternal gayety,
+was an affectation, a pose; but she was vaguely conscious that during
+the present summer he had been a highly successful comedian.
+They had never yet had an explanation; she had not known the need of one.
+Felix was presumably following the bent of his disinterested genius,
+and she felt that she had no advice to give him that he would understand.
+With this, there was always a certain element of comfort about Felix--
+the assurance that he would not interfere.  He was very delicate,
+this pure-minded Felix; in effect, he was her brother, and Madame Munster felt
+that there was a great propriety, every way, in that.  It is true that Felix
+was delicate; he was not fond of explanations with his sister; this was
+one of the very few things in the world about which he was uncomfortable.
+But now he was not thinking of anything uncomfortable.
+
+"Dear brother," said Eugenia at last, "do stop making les yeux doux
+at the rain."
+
+"With pleasure.  I will make them at you!" answered Felix.
+
+"How much longer," asked Eugenia, in a moment, "do you propose to remain
+in this lovely spot?"
+
+Felix stared.  "Do you want to go away--already?"
+
+" 'Already' is delicious.  I am not so happy as you."
+
+Felix dropped into a chair, looking at the fire.  "The fact is I am happy,"
+he said in his light, clear tone.
+
+"And do you propose to spend your life in making love to Gertrude Wentworth?"
+
+"Yes!" said Felix, smiling sidewise at his sister.
+
+The Baroness returned his glance, much more gravely; and then,
+"Do you like her?" she asked.
+
+"Don't you?"  Felix demanded.
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment.  "I will answer you in
+the words of the gentleman who was asked if he liked music:
+'Je ne la crains pas!'"
+
+"She admires you immensely," said Felix.
+
+"I don't care for that.  Other women should not admire one."
+
+"They should dislike you?"
+
+Again Madame Munster hesitated.  "They should hate me!
+It 's a measure of the time I have been losing here that they don't."
+
+"No time is lost in which one has been happy!" said Felix,
+with a bright sententiousness which may well have been
+a little irritating.
+
+"And in which," rejoined his sister, with a harsher laugh,
+"one has secured the affections of a young lady with a fortune!"
+
+Felix explained, very candidly and seriously.  "I have secured Gertrude's
+affection, but I am by no means sure that I have secured her fortune.
+That may come--or it may not."
+
+"Ah, well, it may!  That 's the great point."
+
+"It depends upon her father.  He does n't smile upon our union.
+You know he wants her to marry Mr. Brand."
+
+"I know nothing about it!" cried the Baroness.  "Please to put on a log."
+Felix complied with her request and sat watching the quickening of the flame.
+Presently his sister added, "And you propose to elope with mademoiselle?"
+
+"By no means.  I don't wish to do anything that 's disagreeable
+to Mr. Wentworth.  He has been far too kind to us."
+
+"But you must choose between pleasing yourself and pleasing him."
+
+"I want to please every one!" exclaimed Felix, joyously.
+"I have a good conscience.  I made up my mind at the outset
+that it was not my place to make love to Gertrude."
+
+"So, to simplify matters, she made love to you!"
+
+Felix looked at his sister with sudden gravity.  "You say you are not
+afraid of her," he said.  "But perhaps you ought to be--a little.
+She 's a very clever person."
+
+"I begin to see it!" cried the Baroness.  Her brother, making no
+rejoinder, leaned back in his chair, and there was a long silence.
+At last, with an altered accent, Madame Munster put another question.
+"You expect, at any rate, to marry?"
+
+"I shall be greatly disappointed if we don't."
+
+"A disappointment or two will do you good!" the Baroness declared.
+"And, afterwards, do you mean to turn American?"
+
+"It seems to me I am a very good American already.
+But we shall go to Europe.  Gertrude wants extremely to
+see the world."
+
+"Ah, like me, when I came here!" said the Baroness, with a little laugh.
+
+"No, not like you," Felix rejoined, looking at his sister with a
+certain gentle seriousness.  While he looked at her she rose from
+her chair, and he also got up.  "Gertrude is not at all like you,"
+he went on; "but in her own way she is almost as clever."
+He paused a moment; his soul was full of an agreeable
+feeling and of a lively disposition to express it.
+His sister, to his spiritual vision, was always like the lunar
+disk when only a part of it is lighted.  The shadow on this
+bright surface seemed to him to expand and to contract;
+but whatever its proportions, he always appreciated the moonlight.
+He looked at the Baroness, and then he kissed her.
+"I am very much in love with Gertrude," he said.
+Eugenia turned away and walked about the room, and Felix continued.
+"She is very interesting, and very different from what she seems.
+She has never had a chance.  She is very brilliant.
+We will go to Europe and amuse ourselves."
+
+The Baroness had gone to the window, where she stood looking out.
+The day was drearier than ever; the rain was doggedly falling.
+"Yes, to amuse yourselves," she said at last, "you had decidedly
+better go to Europe!"  Then she turned round, looking at her brother.
+A chair stood near her; she leaned her hands upon the back of it.
+"Don't you think it is very good of me," she asked, "to come
+all this way with you simply to see you properly married--
+if properly it is?"
+
+"Oh, it will be properly!" cried Felix, with light eagerness.
+
+The Baroness gave a little laugh.  "You are thinking only of yourself,
+and you don't answer my question.  While you are amusing yourself--
+with the brilliant Gertrude--what shall I be doing?"
+
+"Vous serez de la partie!" cried Felix.
+
+"Thank you:  I should spoil it."  The Baroness dropped her
+eyes for some moments.  "Do you propose, however, to leave
+me here?" she inquired.
+
+Felix smiled at her.  "My dearest sister, where you are concerned
+I never propose.  I execute your commands."
+
+"I believe," said Eugenia, slowly, "that you are the most heartless
+person living.  Don't you see that I am in trouble?"
+
+"I saw that you were not cheerful, and I gave you some good news."
+
+"Well, let me give you some news," said the Baroness.
+"You probably will not have discovered it for yourself.
+Robert Acton wants to marry me."
+
+"No, I had not discovered that.  But I quite understand it.
+Why does it make you unhappy?"
+
+"Because I can't decide."
+
+"Accept him, accept him!" cried Felix, joyously.  "He is the best
+fellow in the world."
+
+"He is immensely in love with me," said the Baroness.
+
+"And he has a large fortune.  Permit me in turn to remind you of that."
+
+"Oh, I am perfectly aware of it," said Eugenia.
+"That 's a great item in his favor.  I am terribly candid."
+And she left her place and came nearer her brother,
+looking at him hard.  He was turning over several things;
+she was wondering in what manner he really understood her.
+
+There were several ways of understanding her:
+there was what she said, and there was what she meant,
+and there was something, between the two, that was neither.
+It is probable that, in the last analysis, what she meant was
+that Felix should spare her the necessity of stating the case
+more exactly and should hold himself commissioned to assist her
+by all honorable means to marry the best fellow in the world.
+But in all this it was never discovered what Felix understood.
+
+"Once you have your liberty, what are your objections?" he asked.
+
+"Well, I don't particularly like him."
+
+"Oh, try a little."
+
+"I am trying now," said Eugenia.  "I should succeed better if he did
+n't live here.  I could never live here."
+
+"Make him go to Europe," Felix suggested.
+
+"Ah, there you speak of happiness based upon violent effort,"
+the Baroness rejoined.  "That is not what I am looking for.
+He would never live in Europe."
+
+"He would live anywhere, with you!" said Felix, gallantly.
+
+His sister looked at him still, with a ray of penetration
+in her charming eyes; then she turned away again.  "You see,
+at all events," she presently went on, "that if it had been
+said of me that I had come over here to seek my fortune it
+would have to be added that I have found it!"
+
+"Don't leave it lying!" urged Felix, with smiling solemnity.
+
+"I am much obliged to you for your interest," his sister declared,
+after a moment.  "But promise me one thing:  pas de zele!
+If Mr. Acton should ask you to plead his cause, excuse yourself."
+
+"I shall certainly have the excuse," said Felix, "that I have a cause
+of my own to plead."
+
+"If he should talk of me--favorably," Eugenia continued,
+"warn him against dangerous illusions.  I detest importunities;
+I want to decide at my leisure, with my eyes open."
+
+"I shall be discreet," said Felix, "except to you.
+To you I will say, Accept him outright."
+
+She had advanced to the open door-way, and she stood looking at him.
+"I will go and dress and think of it," she said; and he heard her moving
+slowly to her apartments.
+
+Late in the afternoon the rain stopped, and just afterwards
+there was a great flaming, flickering, trickling sunset.
+Felix sat in his painting-room and did some work; but at last,
+as the light, which had not been brilliant, began to fade, he laid
+down his brushes and came out to the little piazza of the cottage.
+Here he walked up and down for some time, looking at the splendid
+blaze of the western sky and saying, as he had often said before,
+that this was certainly the country of sunsets.  There was something
+in these glorious deeps of fire that quickened his imagination;
+he always found images and promises in the western sky.
+He thought of a good many things--of roaming about the world with
+Gertrude Wentworth; he seemed to see their possible adventures,
+in a glowing frieze, between the cloud-bars; then of what Eugenia
+had just been telling him.  He wished very much that Madame M;
+auunster would make a comfortable and honorable marriage.
+Presently, as the sunset expanded and deepened, the fancy took
+him of making a note of so magnificent a piece of coloring.
+He returned to his studio and fetched out a small panel,
+with his palette and brushes, and, placing the panel
+against a window-sill, he began to daub with great gusto.
+While he was so occupied he saw Mr. Brand, in the distance,
+slowly come down from Mr. Wentworth's house, nursing a large
+folded umbrella.  He walked with a joyless, meditative tread,
+and his eyes were bent upon the ground.  Felix poised his
+brush for a moment, watching him; then, by a sudden impulse,
+as he drew nearer, advanced to the garden-gate and signaled to him--
+the palette and bunch of brushes contributing to this effect.
+
+Mr. Brand stopped and started; then he appeared to decide to accept
+Felix's invitation.  He came out of Mr. Wentworth's gate and passed along
+the road; after which he entered the little garden of the cottage.
+Felix had gone back to his sunset; but he made his visitor welcome
+while he rapidly brushed it in.
+
+"I wanted so much to speak to you that I thought I would call you,"
+he said, in the friendliest tone.  "All the more that you have been
+to see me so little.  You have come to see my sister; I know that.
+But you have n't come to see me--the celebrated artist.
+Artists are very sensitive, you know; they notice those things."
+And Felix turned round, smiling, with a brush in his mouth.
+
+Mr. Brand stood there with a certain blank, candid majesty, pulling together
+the large flaps of his umbrella.  "Why should I come to see you?" he asked.
+"I know nothing of Art."
+
+"It would sound very conceited, I suppose," said Felix, "if I were to say
+that it would be a good little chance for you to learn something.
+You would ask me why you should learn; and I should have no answer to that.
+I suppose a minister has no need for Art, eh?"
+
+"He has need for good temper, sir," said Mr. Brand, with decision.
+
+Felix jumped up, with his palette on his thumb and a movement
+of the liveliest deprecation.  "That 's because I keep you standing
+there while I splash my red paint!  I beg a thousand pardons!
+You see what bad manners Art gives a man; and how right you
+are to let it alone.  I did n't mean you should stand, either.
+The piazza, as you see, is ornamented with rustic chairs;
+though indeed I ought to warn you that they have nails in
+the wrong places.  I was just making a note of that sunset.
+I never saw such a blaze of different reds.  It looks
+as if the Celestial City were in flames, eh?  If that were
+really the case I suppose it would be the business of you
+theologians to put out the fire.  Fancy me--an ungodly artist--
+quietly sitting down to paint it!"
+
+Mr. Brand had always credited Felix Young with a certain impudence,
+but it appeared to him that on this occasion his impudence was so great
+as to make a special explanation--or even an apology--necessary.
+And the impression, it must be added, was sufficiently natural.
+Felix had at all times a brilliant assurance of manner which was simply
+the vehicle of his good spirits and his good will; but at present
+he had a special design, and as he would have admitted that the design
+was audacious, so he was conscious of having summoned all the arts
+of conversation to his aid.  But he was so far from desiring to offend
+his visitor that he was rapidly asking himself what personal compliment
+he could pay the young clergyman that would gratify him most.
+If he could think of it, he was prepared to pay it down.
+"Have you been preaching one of your beautiful sermons to-day?"
+he suddenly asked, laying down his palette.  This was not what Felix
+had been trying to think of, but it was a tolerable stop-gap.
+
+Mr. Brand frowned--as much as a man can frown who has very fair,
+soft eyebrows, and, beneath them, very gentle, tranquil eyes.
+"No, I have not preached any sermon to-day. Did you bring me
+over here for the purpose of making that inquiry?"
+
+Felix saw that he was irritated, and he regretted it immensely;
+but he had no fear of not being, in the end, agreeable to Mr. Brand.
+He looked at him, smiling and laying his hand on his arm.
+"No, no, not for that--not for that.  I wanted to ask you something;
+I wanted to tell you something.  I am sure it will interest
+you very much.  Only--as it is something rather private--
+we had better come into my little studio.  I have a western window;
+we can still see the sunset.  Andiamo!"  And he gave a little pat
+to his companion's arm.
+
+He led the way in; Mr. Brand stiffly and softly followed.
+The twilight had thickened in the little studio; but the wall
+opposite the western window was covered with a deep pink flush.
+There were a great many sketches and half-finished canvasses
+suspended in this rosy glow, and the corners of the room
+were vague and dusky.  Felix begged Mr. Brand to sit down;
+then glancing round him, "By Jove, how pretty it looks!"
+he cried.  But Mr. Brand would not sit down; he went and leaned
+against the window; he wondered what Felix wanted of him.
+In the shadow, on the darker parts of the wall, he saw
+the gleam of three or four pictures that looked fantastic
+and surprising.  They seemed to represent naked figures.
+Felix stood there, with his head a little bent and his eyes fixed
+upon his visitor, smiling intensely, pulling his mustache.
+Mr. Brand felt vaguely uneasy.  "It is very delicate--
+what I want to say," Felix began.  "But I have been thinking
+of it for some time."
+
+"Please to say it as quickly as possible," said Mr. Brand.
+
+"It 's because you are a clergyman, you know," Felix went on.
+"I don't think I should venture to say it to a common man."
+
+Mr. Brand was silent a moment.  "If it is a question of yielding
+to a weakness, of resenting an injury, I am afraid I am
+a very common man."
+
+"My dearest friend," cried Felix, "this is not an injury;
+it 's a benefit--a great service!  You will like it extremely.
+Only it 's so delicate!"  And, in the dim light, he continued to
+smile intensely.  "You know I take a great interest in my cousins--
+in Charlotte and Gertrude Wentworth.  That 's very evident
+from my having traveled some five thousand miles to see them."
+Mr. Brand said nothing and Felix proceeded.  "Coming into their society
+as a perfect stranger I received of course a great many new impressions,
+and my impressions had a great freshness, a great keenness.
+Do you know what I mean?"
+
+"I am not sure that I do; but I should like you to continue."
+
+"I think my impressions have always a good deal of freshness,"
+said Mr. Brand's entertainer; "but on this occasion it was perhaps
+particularly natural that--coming in, as I say, from outside--
+I should be struck with things that passed unnoticed among yourselves.
+And then I had my sister to help me; and she is simply the most
+observant woman in the world."
+
+"I am not surprised," said Mr. Brand, "that in our little circle
+two intelligent persons should have found food for observation.
+I am sure that, of late, I have found it myself!"
+
+"Ah, but I shall surprise you yet!" cried Felix, laughing.
+"Both my sister and I took a great fancy to my cousin Charlotte."
+
+"Your cousin Charlotte?" repeated Mr. Brand.
+
+"We fell in love with her from the first!"
+
+"You fell in love with Charlotte?"  Mr. Brand murmured.
+
+"Dame!" exclaimed Felix, "she 's a very charming person; and Eugenia
+was especially smitten."  Mr. Brand stood staring, and he pursued,
+"Affection, you know, opens one's eyes, and we noticed something.
+Charlotte is not happy!  Charlotte is in love."  And Felix,
+drawing nearer, laid his hand again upon his companion's arm.
+
+There was something akin to an acknowledgment of fascination in the way
+Mr. Brand looked at him; but the young clergyman retained as yet quite
+enough self-possession to be able to say, with a good deal of solemnity,
+"She is not in love with you."
+
+Felix gave a light laugh, and rejoined with the alacrity
+of a maritime adventurer who feels a puff of wind in his sail.
+"Ah, no; if she were in love with me I should know it!
+I am not so blind as you."
+
+"As I?"
+
+"My dear sir, you are stone blind.  Poor Charlotte is dead
+in love with you!"
+
+Mr. Brand said nothing for a moment; he breathed a little heavily.
+"Is that what you wanted to say to me?" he asked.
+
+"I have wanted to say it these three weeks.  Because of late she has
+been worse.  I told you," added Felix, "it was very delicate."
+
+"Well, sir"--Mr. Brand began; "well, sir"--
+
+"I was sure you did n't know it," Felix continued.  "But don't
+you see--as soon as I mention it--how everything is explained?"
+Mr. Brand answered nothing; he looked for a chair and softly sat down.
+Felix could see that he was blushing; he had looked straight at
+his host hitherto, but now he looked away.  The foremost effect
+of what he had heard had been a sort of irritation of his modesty.
+"Of course," said Felix, "I suggest nothing; it would be very
+presumptuous in me to advise you.  But I think there is no doubt
+about the fact."
+
+Mr. Brand looked hard at the floor for some moments; he was oppressed
+with a mixture of sensations.  Felix, standing there, was very sure
+that one of them was profound surprise.  The innocent young man
+had been completely unsuspicious of poor Charlotte's hidden flame.
+This gave Felix great hope; he was sure that Mr. Brand would be flattered.
+Felix thought him very transparent, and indeed he was so; he could neither
+simulate nor dissimulate.  "I scarcely know what to make of this,"
+he said at last, without looking up; and Felix was struck with the fact
+that he offered no protest or contradiction.  Evidently Felix
+had kindled a train of memories--a retrospective illumination.
+It was making, to Mr. Brand's astonished eyes, a very pretty blaze;
+his second emotion had been a gratification of vanity.
+
+"Thank me for telling you," Felix rejoined.  "It 's a good thing to know."
+
+"I am not sure of that," said Mr. Brand.
+
+"Ah, don't let her languish!"  Felix murmured, lightly and softly.
+
+"You do advise me, then?"  And Mr. Brand looked up.
+
+"I congratulate you!" said Felix, smiling.  He had thought at first his
+visitor was simply appealing; but he saw he was a little ironical.
+
+"It is in your interest; you have interfered with me,"
+the young clergyman went on.
+
+Felix still stood and smiled.  The little room had grown darker,
+and the crimson glow had faded; but Mr. Brand could see the brilliant
+expression of his face.  "I won't pretend not to know what you mean,"
+said Felix at last.  "But I have not really interfered with you.
+Of what you had to lose--with another person--you have lost nothing.
+And think what you have gained!"
+
+"It seems to me I am the proper judge, on each side," Mr. Brand declared.
+He got up, holding the brim of his hat against his mouth and staring at Felix
+through the dusk.
+
+"You have lost an illusion!" said Felix.
+
+"What do you call an illusion?"
+
+"The belief that you really know--that you have ever really known--
+Gertrude Wentworth.  Depend upon that," pursued Felix.
+"I don't know her yet; but I have no illusions; I don't pretend to."
+
+Mr. Brand kept gazing, over his hat.  "She has always been a lucid,
+limpid nature," he said, solemnly.
+
+"She has always been a dormant nature.  She was waiting for a touchstone.
+But now she is beginning to awaken."
+
+"Don't praise her to me!" said Mr. Brand, with a little quaver in his voice.
+"If you have the advantage of me that is not generous."
+
+"My dear sir, I am melting with generosity!" exclaimed Felix.
+"And I am not praising my cousin.  I am simply attempting a
+scientific definition of her.  She doesn't care for abstractions.
+Now I think the contrary is what you have always fancied--
+is the basis on which you have been building.  She is extremely
+preoccupied with the concrete.  I care for the concrete, too.
+But Gertrude is stronger than I; she whirls me along!"
+
+Mr. Brand looked for a moment into the crown of his hat.
+"It 's a most interesting nature."
+
+"So it is," said Felix.  "But it pulls--it pulls--like a
+runaway horse.  Now I like the feeling of a runaway horse;
+and if I am thrown out of the vehicle it is no great matter.
+But if you should be thrown, Mr. Brand"--and Felix paused
+a moment--"another person also would suffer from the accident."
+
+"What other person?"
+
+"Charlotte Wentworth!"
+
+Mr. Brand looked at Felix for a moment sidewise, mistrustfully;
+then his eyes slowly wandered over the ceiling.  Felix was sure
+he was secretly struck with the romance of the situation.
+"I think this is none of our business," the young minister murmured.
+
+"None of mine, perhaps; but surely yours!"
+
+Mr. Brand lingered still, looking at the ceiling; there was evidently
+something he wanted to say.  "What do you mean by Miss Gertrude being strong?"
+he asked abruptly.
+
+"Well," said Felix meditatively, "I mean that she has had
+a great deal of self-possession. She was waiting--for years;
+even when she seemed, perhaps, to be living in the present.
+She knew how to wait; she had a purpose.  That 's what I mean
+by her being strong."
+
+"But what do you mean by her purpose?"
+
+"Well--the purpose to see the world!"
+
+Mr. Brand eyed his strange informant askance again;
+but he said nothing.  At last he turned away, as if to take leave.
+He seemed bewildered, however; for instead of going to
+the door he moved toward the opposite corner of the room.
+Felix stood and watched him for a moment--almost groping
+about in the dusk; then he led him to the door, with a tender,
+almost fraternal movement.  "Is that all you have to say?"
+asked Mr. Brand.
+
+"Yes, it 's all--but it will bear a good deal of thinking of."
+
+Felix went with him to the garden-gate, and watched him slowly walk away into
+the thickening twilight with a relaxed rigidity that tried to rectify itself.
+"He is offended, excited, bewildered, perplexed--and enchanted!"
+Felix said to himself.  "That 's a capital mixture."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Since that visit paid by the Baroness Munster to Mrs. Acton,
+of which some account was given at an earlier stage of
+this narrative, the intercourse between these two ladies had
+been neither frequent nor intimate.  It was not that Mrs. Acton
+had failed to appreciate Madame M; auunster's charms;
+on the contrary, her perception of the graces of manner and
+conversation of her brilliant visitor had been only too acute.
+Mrs. Acton was, as they said in Boston, very "intense,"
+and her impressions were apt to be too many for her.
+The state of her health required the restriction of emotion;
+and this is why, receiving, as she sat in her eternal
+arm-chair, very few visitors, even of the soberest local type,
+she had been obliged to limit the number of her interviews
+with a lady whose costume and manner recalled to her imagination--
+Mrs. Acton's imagination was a marvel--all that she had ever
+read of the most stirring historical periods.  But she had sent
+the Baroness a great many quaintly-worded messages and a great
+many nosegays from her garden and baskets of beautiful fruit.
+Felix had eaten the fruit, and the Baroness had arranged
+the flowers and returned the baskets and the messages.
+On the day that followed that rainy Sunday of which
+mention has been made, Eugenia determined to go and pay
+the beneficent invalid a "visite d'adieux;" so it was that,
+to herself, she qualified her enterprise.  It may be noted
+that neither on the Sunday evening nor on the Monday morning
+had she received that expected visit from Robert Acton.
+To his own consciousness, evidently he was "keeping away;"
+and as the Baroness, on her side, was keeping away from
+her uncle's, whither, for several days, Felix had been
+the unembarrassed bearer of apologies and regrets for absence,
+chance had not taken the cards from the hands of design.
+Mr. Wentworth and his daughters had respected Eugenia's seclusion;
+certain intervals of mysterious retirement appeared to them,
+vaguely, a natural part of the graceful, rhythmic movement of so
+remarkable a life.  Gertrude especially held these periods in honor;
+she wondered what Madame M; auunster did at such times, but she
+would not have permitted herself to inquire too curiously.
+
+The long rain had freshened the air, and twelve hours' brilliant sunshine
+had dried the roads; so that the Baroness, in the late afternoon,
+proposing to walk to Mrs. Acton's, exposed herself to no great discomfort.
+As with her charming undulating step she moved along the clean,
+grassy margin of the road, beneath the thickly-hanging boughs of the orchards,
+through the quiet of the hour and place and the rich maturity of the summer,
+she was even conscious of a sort of luxurious melancholy.  The Baroness
+had the amiable weakness of attaching herself to places--even when she
+had begun with a little aversion; and now, with the prospect of departure,
+she felt tenderly toward this well-wooded corner of the Western world,
+where the sunsets were so beautiful and one's ambitions were so pure.
+Mrs. Acton was able to receive her; but on entering this lady's large,
+freshly-scented room the Baroness saw that she was looking very ill.
+She was wonderfully white and transparent, and, in her flowered
+arm-chair, she made no attempt to move.  But she flushed a little--
+like a young girl, the Baroness thought--and she rested her clear,
+smiling eyes upon those of her visitor.  Her voice was low and monotonous,
+like a voice that had never expressed any human passions.
+
+"I have come to bid you good-by," said Eugenia.
+"I shall soon be going away."
+
+"When are you going away?"
+
+"Very soon--any day."
+
+"I am very sorry," said Mrs. Acton.  "I hoped you would stay--always."
+
+"Always?"  Eugenia demanded.
+
+"Well, I mean a long time," said Mrs. Acton, in her sweet, feeble tone.
+"They tell me you are so comfortable--that you have got such a
+beautiful little house."
+
+Eugenia stared--that is, she smiled; she thought of her poor
+little chalet and she wondered whether her hostess were jesting.
+"Yes, my house is exquisite," she said; "though not to be compared
+to yours.  "
+
+"And my son is so fond of going to see you," Mrs. Acton added.
+"I am afraid my son will miss you."
+
+"Ah, dear madame," said Eugenia, with a little laugh, "I can't stay
+in America for your son!"
+
+"Don't you like America?"
+
+The Baroness looked at the front of her dress.  "If I liked it--
+that would not be staying for your son!"
+
+Mrs. Acton gazed at her with her grave, tender eyes, as if she
+had not quite understood.  The Baroness at last found something
+irritating in the sweet, soft stare of her hostess; and if one
+were not bound to be merciful to great invalids she would almost
+have taken the liberty of pronouncing her, mentally, a fool.
+"I am afraid, then, I shall never see you again," said Mrs. Acton.
+"You know I am dying."
+
+"Ah, dear madame," murmured Eugenia.
+
+"I want to leave my children cheerful and happy.
+My daughter will probably marry her cousin."
+
+"Two such interesting young people," said the Baroness, vaguely.
+She was not thinking of Clifford Wentworth.
+
+"I feel so tranquil about my end," Mrs. Acton went on.
+"It is coming so easily, so surely."  And she paused,
+with her mild gaze always on Eugenia's.
+
+The Baroness hated to be reminded of death; but even in its imminence,
+so far as Mrs. Acton was concerned, she preserved her good manners.
+"Ah, madame, you are too charming an invalid," she rejoined.
+
+But the delicacy of this rejoinder was apparently lost upon
+her hostess, who went on in her low, reasonable voice.
+"I want to leave my children bright and comfortable.
+You seem to me all so happy here--just as you are.
+So I wish you could stay.  It would be so pleasant for Robert."
+
+Eugenia wondered what she meant by its being pleasant for Robert;
+but she felt that she would never know what such a woman as that meant.
+She got up; she was afraid Mrs. Acton would tell her again
+that she was dying.  "Good-by, dear madame," she said.
+"I must remember that your strength is precious."
+
+Mrs. Acton took her hand and held it a moment.  "Well, you have
+been happy here, have n't you?  And you like us all, don't you?
+I wish you would stay," she added, "in your beautiful little house."
+
+She had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the hall,
+to show her down-stairs; but the large landing outside
+her door was empty, and Eugenia stood there looking about.
+She felt irritated; the dying lady had not "la main heureuse."
+She passed slowly down-stairs, still looking about.  The broad staircase
+made a great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward,
+with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in curious
+old pots of blue china-ware. The yellow afternoon light came in
+through the flowers and flickered a little on the white wainscots.
+Eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, save for
+the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock.  The lower hall stretched away
+at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a large Oriental rug.
+Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great many things.
+"Comme c'est bien!" she said to herself; such a large, solid,
+irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to her to indicate.
+And then she reflected that Mrs. Acton was soon to withdraw from it.
+The reflection accompanied her the rest of the way down-stairs,
+where she paused again, making more observations.  The hall was
+extremely broad, and on either side of the front door was a wide,
+deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of everything back
+into the house.  There were high-backed chairs along the wall
+and big Eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side,
+a large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within,
+dimly gleaming.  The doors were open--into the darkened parlor,
+the library, the dining-room. All these rooms seemed empty.
+Eugenia passed along, and stopped a moment on the threshold of each.
+"Comme c'est bien!" she murmured again; she had thought of just
+such a house as this when she decided to come to America.
+She opened the front door for herself--her light tread had summoned
+none of the servants--and on the threshold she gave a last look.
+Outside, she was still in the humor for curious contemplation;
+so instead of going directly down the little drive, to the gate,
+she wandered away towards the garden, which lay to the right of the house.
+She had not gone many yards over the grass before she paused quickly;
+she perceived a gentleman stretched upon the level verdure,
+beneath a tree.  He had not heard her coming, and he lay motionless,
+flat on his back, with his hands clasped under his head,
+staring up at the sky; so that the Baroness was able to reflect,
+at her leisure, upon the question of his identity.
+It was that of a person who had lately been much in her thoughts;
+but her first impulse, nevertheless, was to turn away; the last thing
+she desired was to have the air of coming in quest of Robert Acton.
+The gentleman on the grass, however, gave her no time to decide;
+he could not long remain unconscious of so agreeable a presence.
+He rolled back his eyes, stared, gave an exclamation, and then jumped up.
+He stood an instant, looking at her.
+
+"Excuse my ridiculous position," he said.
+
+"I have just now no sense of the ridiculous.  But, in case you have,
+don't imagine I came to see you."
+
+"Take care," rejoined Acton, "how you put it into my head!
+I was thinking of you."
+
+"The occupation of extreme leisure!" said the Baroness.
+"To think of a woman when you are in that position is no compliment."
+
+"I did n't say I was thinking well!"  Acton affirmed, smiling.
+
+She looked at him, and then she turned away.
+
+"Though I did n't come to see you," she said, "remember at least
+that I am within your gates."
+
+"I am delighted--I am honored!  Won't you come into the house?"
+
+"I have just come out of it.  I have been calling upon your mother.
+I have been bidding her farewell."
+
+"Farewell?"  Acton demanded.
+
+"I am going away," said the Baroness.  And she turned away again,
+as if to illustrate her meaning.
+
+"When are you going?" asked Acton, standing a moment in his place.
+But the Baroness made no answer, and he followed her.
+
+"I came this way to look at your garden," she said, walking back to the gate,
+over the grass.  "But I must go."
+
+"Let me at least go with you."  He went with her, and they said
+nothing till they reached the gate.  It was open, and they looked
+down the road which was darkened over with long bosky shadows.
+"Must you go straight home?"  Acton asked.
+
+But she made no answer.  She said, after a moment, "Why have you
+not been to see me?"  He said nothing, and then she went on,
+"Why don't you answer me?"
+
+"I am trying to invent an answer," Acton confessed.
+
+"Have you none ready?"
+
+"None that I can tell you," he said.  "But let me walk with you now."
+
+"You may do as you like."
+
+She moved slowly along the road, and Acton went with her.
+Presently he said, "If I had done as I liked I would have come
+to see you several times."
+
+"Is that invented?" asked Eugenia.
+
+"No, that is natural.  I stayed away because"--
+
+"Ah, here comes the reason, then!"
+
+"Because I wanted to think about you."
+
+"Because you wanted to lie down!" said the Baroness.
+"I have seen you lie down--almost--in my drawing-room."
+
+Acton stopped in the road, with a movement which seemed to beg
+her to linger a little.  She paused, and he looked at her awhile;
+he thought her very charming.  "You are jesting," he said;
+"but if you are really going away it is very serious."
+
+"If I stay," and she gave a little laugh, "it is more serious still!"
+
+"When shall you go?"
+
+"As soon as possible."
+
+"And why?"
+
+"Why should I stay?"
+
+"Because we all admire you so."
+
+"That is not a reason.  I am admired also in Europe."
+And she began to walk homeward again.
+
+"What could I say to keep you?" asked Acton.  He wanted to keep her,
+and it was a fact that he had been thinking of her for a week.
+He was in love with her now; he was conscious of that, or he thought he was;
+and the only question with him was whether he could trust her.
+
+"What you can say to keep me?" she repeated.  "As I want
+very much to go it is not in my interest to tell you.
+Besides, I can't imagine."
+
+He went on with her in silence; he was much more affected by what she
+had told him than appeared.  Ever since that evening of his return
+from Newport her image had had a terrible power to trouble him.
+What Clifford Wentworth had told him--that had affected him,
+too, in an adverse sense; but it had not liberated him from
+the discomfort of a charm of which his intelligence was impatient.
+"She is not honest, she is not honest," he kept murmuring to himself.
+That is what he had been saying to the summer sky, ten minutes before.
+Unfortunately, he was unable to say it finally, definitively; and now
+that he was near her it seemed to matter wonderfully little.
+"She is a woman who will lie," he had said to himself.
+Now, as he went along, he reminded himself of this observation;
+but it failed to frighten him as it had done before.
+He almost wished he could make her lie and then convict her of it,
+so that he might see how he should like that.  He kept thinking of this
+as he walked by her side, while she moved forward with her light,
+graceful dignity.  He had sat with her before; he had driven with her;
+but he had never walked with her.
+
+"By Jove, how comme il faut she is!" he said, as he observed her sidewise.
+When they reached the cottage in the orchard she passed into the gate
+without asking him to follow; but she turned round, as he stood there,
+to bid him good-night.
+
+"I asked you a question the other night which you never answered," he said.
+"Have you sent off that document--liberating yourself?"
+
+She hesitated for a single moment--very naturally.
+Then, "Yes," she said, simply.
+
+He turned away; he wondered whether that would do for his lie.
+But he saw her again that evening, for the Baroness reappeared
+at her uncle's. He had little talk with her, however;
+two gentlemen had driven out from Boston, in a buggy, to call
+upon Mr. Wentworth and his daughters, and Madame Munster
+was an object of absorbing interest to both of the visitors.
+One of them, indeed, said nothing to her; he only sat and
+watched with intense gravity, and leaned forward solemnly,
+presenting his ear (a very large one), as if he were deaf,
+whenever she dropped an observation.  He had evidently been
+impressed with the idea of her misfortunes and reverses:
+he never smiled.  His companion adopted a lighter, easier style;
+sat as near as possible to Madame Munster; attempted to draw her out,
+and proposed every few moments a new topic of conversation.
+Eugenia was less vividly responsive than usual and had less to
+say than, from her brilliant reputation, her interlocutor expected,
+upon the relative merits of European and American institutions;
+but she was inaccessible to Robert Acton, who roamed about
+the piazza with his hands in his pockets, listening for
+the grating sound of the buggy from Boston, as it should be
+brought round to the side-door. But he listened in vain,
+and at last he lost patience.  His sister came to him and begged
+him to take her home, and he presently went off with her.
+Eugenia observed him leaving the house with Lizzie;
+in her present mood the fact seemed a contribution to her
+irritated conviction that he had several precious qualities.
+"Even that mal-elevee little girl," she reflected, "makes him
+do what she wishes."
+
+She had been sitting just within one of the long windows that opened upon
+the piazza; but very soon after Acton had gone away she got up abruptly,
+just when the talkative gentleman from Boston was asking her what she
+thought of the "moral tone" of that city.  On the piazza she encountered
+Clifford Wentworth, coming round from the other side of the house.
+She stopped him; she told him she wished to speak to him.
+
+"Why did n't you go home with your cousin?" she asked.
+
+Clifford stared.  "Why, Robert has taken her," he said.
+
+"Exactly so.  But you don't usually leave that to him."
+
+"Oh," said Clifford, "I want to see those fellows start off.
+They don't know how to drive."
+
+"It is not, then, that you have quarreled with your cousin?"
+
+Clifford reflected a moment, and then with a simplicity which had,
+for the Baroness, a singularly baffling quality, "Oh, no;
+we have made up!" he said.
+
+She looked at him for some moments; but Clifford had begun to be afraid
+of the Baroness's looks, and he endeavored, now, to shift himself out
+of their range.  "Why do you never come to see me any more?" she asked.
+"Have I displeased you?"
+
+"Displeased me?  Well, I guess not!" said Clifford, with a laugh.
+
+"Why have n't you come, then?"
+
+"Well, because I am afraid of getting shut up in that back room."
+
+Eugenia kept looking at him.  "I should think you would like that."
+
+"Like it!" cried Clifford.
+
+"I should, if I were a young man calling upon a charming woman."
+
+"A charming woman is n't much use to me when I am shut up
+in that back room!"
+
+"I am afraid I am not of much use to you anywhere!" said Madame M; auunster.
+"And yet you know how I have offered to be."
+
+"Well," observed Clifford, by way of response, "there comes the buggy."
+
+"Never mind the buggy.  Do you know I am going away?"
+
+"Do you mean now?"
+
+"I mean in a few days.  I leave this place."
+
+"You are going back to Europe?"
+
+"To Europe, where you are to come and see me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I 'll come out there," said Clifford.
+
+"But before that," Eugenia declared, "you must come and see me here."
+
+"Well, I shall keep clear of that back room!" rejoined her
+simple young kinsman.
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment.  "Yes, you must come frankly--boldly.
+That will be very much better.  I see that now."
+
+"I see it!" said Clifford.  And then, in an instant, "What 's the matter with
+that buggy?"  His practiced ear had apparently detected an unnatural creak
+in the wheels of the light vehicle which had been brought to the portico,
+and he hurried away to investigate so grave an anomaly.
+
+The Baroness walked homeward, alone, in the starlight,
+asking herself a question.  Was she to have gained nothing--
+was she to have gained nothing?
+
+Gertrude Wentworth had held a silent place in the little circle
+gathered about the two gentlemen from Boston.  She was not
+interested in the visitors; she was watching Madame Munster,
+as she constantly watched her.  She knew that Eugenia also was
+not interested--that she was bored; and Gertrude was absorbed
+in study of the problem how, in spite of her indifference and her
+absent attention, she managed to have such a charming manner.
+That was the manner Gertrude would have liked to have;
+she determined to cultivate it, and she wished that--
+to give her the charm--she might in future very often be bored.
+While she was engaged in these researches, Felix Young was
+looking for Charlotte, to whom he had something to say.
+For some time, now, he had had something to say to Charlotte,
+and this evening his sense of the propriety of holding some
+special conversation with her had reached the motive-point--
+resolved itself into acute and delightful desire.  He wandered
+through the empty rooms on the large ground-floor of the house,
+and found her at last in a small apartment denominated,
+for reasons not immediately apparent, Mr. Wentworth's "office:"
+an extremely neat and well-dusted room, with an array of law-books,
+in time-darkened sheep-skin, on one of the walls; a large map
+of the United States on the other, flanked on either side by an old
+steel engraving of one of Raphael's Madonnas; and on the third
+several glass cases containing specimens of butterflies and beetles.
+Charlotte was sitting by a lamp, embroidering a slipper.
+Felix did not ask for whom the slipper was destined;
+he saw it was very large.
+
+He moved a chair toward her and sat down, smiling as usual, but, at first,
+not speaking.  She watched him, with her needle poised, and with a
+certain shy, fluttered look which she always wore when he approached her.
+There was something in Felix's manner that quickened her modesty,
+her self-consciousness; if absolute choice had been given her she would
+have preferred never to find herself alone with him; and in fact,
+though she thought him a most brilliant, distinguished, and well-meaning
+person, she had exercised a much larger amount of tremulous tact
+than he had ever suspected, to circumvent the accident of tete-a-tete.
+Poor Charlotte could have given no account of the matter that would
+not have seemed unjust both to herself and to her foreign kinsman;
+she could only have said--or rather, she would never have said it--
+that she did not like so much gentleman's society at once.
+She was not reassured, accordingly, when he began, emphasizing his words
+with a kind of admiring radiance, "My dear cousin, I am enchanted at
+finding you alone."
+
+"I am very often alone," Charlotte observed.  Then she quickly added,
+"I don't mean I am lonely!"
+
+"So clever a woman as you is never lonely," said Felix.
+"You have company in your beautiful work."  And he glanced
+at the big slipper.
+
+"I like to work," declared Charlotte, simply.
+
+"So do I!" said her companion.  "And I like to idle too.
+But it is not to idle that I have come in search of you.
+I want to tell you something very particular."
+
+"Well," murmured Charlotte; "of course, if you must"--
+
+"My dear cousin," said Felix, "it 's nothing that a young lady may not
+listen to.  At least I suppose it is n't. But voyons; you shall judge.
+I am terribly in love."
+
+"Well, Felix," began Miss Wentworth, gravely.  But her very gravity appeared
+to check the development of her phrase.
+
+"I am in love with your sister; but in love, Charlotte--in love!"
+the young man pursued.  Charlotte had laid her work in her lap;
+her hands were tightly folded on top of it; she was staring at
+the carpet.  "In short, I 'm in love, dear lady," said Felix.
+"Now I want you to help me."
+
+"To help you?" asked Charlotte, with a tremor.
+
+"I don't mean with Gertrude; she and I have a perfect understanding;
+and oh, how well she understands one!  I mean with your father
+and with the world in general, including Mr. Brand."
+
+"Poor Mr. Brand!" said Charlotte, slowly, but with a simplicity which made it
+evident to Felix that the young minister had not repeated to Miss Wentworth
+the talk that had lately occurred between them.
+
+"Ah, now, don't say 'poor' Mr. Brand!  I don't pity Mr. Brand at all.
+But I pity your father a little, and I don't want to displease him.
+Therefore, you see, I want you to plead for me.  You don't think me
+very shabby, eh?"
+
+"Shabby?" exclaimed Charlotte softly, for whom Felix represented
+the most polished and iridescent qualities of mankind.
+
+"I don't mean in my appearance," rejoined Felix, laughing;
+for Charlotte was looking at his boots.  "I mean in my conduct.
+You don't think it 's an abuse of hospitality?"
+
+"To--to care for Gertrude?" asked Charlotte.
+
+"To have really expressed one's self.  Because I have expressed
+myself, Charlotte; I must tell you the whole truth--I have!
+Of course I want to marry her--and here is the difficulty.  I held off
+as long as I could; but she is such a terribly fascinating person!
+She 's a strange creature, Charlotte; I don't believe you really know her."
+Charlotte took up her tapestry again, and again she laid it down.
+"I know your father has had higher views," Felix continued; "and I think
+you have shared them.  You have wanted to marry her to Mr. Brand."
+
+"Oh, no," said Charlotte, very earnestly.  "Mr. Brand has always admired her.
+But we did not want anything of that kind."
+
+Felix stared.  "Surely, marriage was what you proposed."
+
+"Yes; but we did n't wish to force her."
+
+"A la bonne heure!  That 's very unsafe you know.
+With these arranged marriages there is often the deuce to pay."
+
+"Oh, Felix," said Charlotte, "we did n't want to 'arrange.'  "
+
+"I am delighted to hear that.  Because in such cases--even when the woman
+is a thoroughly good creature--she can't help looking for a compensation.
+A charming fellow comes along--and voila!"  Charlotte sat mutely staring
+at the floor, and Felix presently added, "Do go on with your slipper,
+I like to see you work."
+
+Charlotte took up her variegated canvas, and began to draw
+vague blue stitches in a big round rose.  "If Gertrude is so--
+so strange," she said, "why do you want to marry her?"
+
+"Ah, that 's it, dear Charlotte!  I like strange women;
+I always have liked them.  Ask Eugenia!  And Gertrude is wonderful;
+she says the most beautiful things!"
+
+Charlotte looked at him, almost for the first time,
+as if her meaning required to be severely pointed.
+"You have a great influence over her.  "
+
+"Yes--and no!" said Felix.  "I had at first, I think;
+but now it is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other;
+it is reciprocal.  She affects me strongly--for she is so strong.
+I don't believe you know her; it 's a beautiful nature."
+
+"Oh, yes, Felix; I have always thought Gertrude's nature beautiful."
+
+"Well, if you think so now," cried the young man, "wait and see!
+She 's a folded flower.  Let me pluck her from the parent tree
+and you will see her expand.  I 'm sure you will enjoy it."
+
+"I don't understand you," murmured Charlotte.  "I can't, Felix."
+
+"Well, you can understand this--that I beg you to say a good word
+for me to your father.  He regards me, I naturally believe,
+as a very light fellow, a Bohemian, an irregular character.
+Tell him I am not all this; if I ever was, I have forgotten it.
+I am fond of pleasure--yes; but of innocent pleasure.  Pain is all one;
+but in pleasure, you know, there are tremendous distinctions.
+Say to him that Gertrude is a folded flower and that I am
+a serious man!"
+
+Charlotte got up from her chair slowly rolling up her work.
+"We know you are very kind to every one, Felix," she said.
+"But we are extremely sorry for Mr. Brand."
+
+"Of course you are--you especially!  Because," added Felix hastily,
+"you are a woman.  But I don't pity him.  It ought to be enough
+for any man that you take an interest in him."
+
+"It is not enough for Mr. Brand," said Charlotte, simply.
+And she stood there a moment, as if waiting conscientiously
+for anything more that Felix might have to say.
+
+"Mr. Brand is not so keen about his marriage as he was," he presently said.
+"He is afraid of your sister.  He begins to think she is wicked."
+
+Charlotte looked at him now with beautiful, appealing eyes--
+eyes into which he saw the tears rising.  "Oh, Felix, Felix,"
+she cried, "what have you done to her?"
+
+"I think she was asleep; I have waked her up!"
+
+But Charlotte, apparently, was really crying, she walked straight
+out of the room.  And Felix, standing there and meditating,
+had the apparent brutality to take satisfaction in her tears.
+
+Late that night Gertrude, silent and serious, came to him in the garden;
+it was a kind of appointment.  Gertrude seemed to like appointments.
+She plucked a handful of heliotrope and stuck it into the front of her dress,
+but she said nothing.  They walked together along one of the paths,
+and Felix looked at the great, square, hospitable house, massing itself
+vaguely in the starlight, with all its windows darkened.
+
+"I have a little of a bad conscience," he said.  "I ought n't to meet
+you this way till I have got your father's consent."
+
+Gertrude looked at him for some time.  "I don't understand you."
+
+"You very often say that," he said.  "Considering how little we understand
+each other, it is a wonder how well we get on!"
+
+"We have done nothing but meet since you came here--but meet alone.
+The first time I ever saw you we were alone," Gertrude went on.
+"What is the difference now?  Is it because it is at night?"
+
+"The difference, Gertrude," said Felix, stopping in the path,
+"the difference is that I love you more--more than before!"
+And then they stood there, talking, in the warm stillness and in
+front of the closed dark house.  "I have been talking to Charlotte--
+been trying to bespeak her interest with your father.
+She has a kind of sublime perversity; was ever a woman so bent
+upon cutting off her own head?"
+
+"You are too careful," said Gertrude; "you are too diplomatic."
+
+"Well," cried the young man, "I did n't come here to make any one unhappy!"
+
+Gertrude looked round her awhile in the odorous darkness.
+"I will do anything you please," she said.
+
+"For instance?" asked Felix, smiling.
+
+"I will go away.  I will do anything you please."
+
+Felix looked at her in solemn admiration.  "Yes, we will go away," he said.
+"But we will make peace first."
+
+Gertrude looked about her again, and then she broke out, passionately, "Why do
+they try to make one feel guilty?  Why do they make it so difficult?
+Why can't they understand?"
+
+"I will make them understand!" said Felix.  He drew her hand into his arm,
+and they wandered about in the garden, talking, for an hour.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Felix allowed Charlotte time to plead his cause; and then, on the
+third day, he sought an interview with his uncle.  It was in the morning;
+Mr. Wentworth was in his office; and, on going in, Felix found
+that Charlotte was at that moment in conference with her father.
+She had, in fact, been constantly near him since her interview
+with Felix; she had made up her mind that it was her duty to repeat
+very literally her cousin's passionate plea.  She had accordingly
+followed Mr. Wentworth about like a shadow, in order to find him
+at hand when she should have mustered sufficient composure to speak.
+For poor Charlotte, in this matter, naturally lacked composure;
+especially when she meditated upon some of Felix's intimations.
+It was not cheerful work, at the best, to keep giving small
+hammer-taps to the coffin in which one had laid away, for burial,
+the poor little unacknowledged offspring of one's own misbehaving heart;
+and the occupation was not rendered more agreeable by the fact that
+the ghost of one's stifled dream had been summoned from the shades
+by the strange, bold words of a talkative young foreigner.
+What had Felix meant by saying that Mr. Brand was not so keen?
+To herself her sister's justly depressed suitor had shown no sign
+of faltering.  Charlotte trembled all over when she allowed herself
+to believe for an instant now and then that, privately, Mr. Brand
+might have faltered; and as it seemed to give more force to Felix's
+words to repeat them to her father, she was waiting until she
+should have taught herself to be very calm.  But she had now
+begun to tell Mr. Wentworth that she was extremely anxious.
+She was proceeding to develop this idea, to enumerate the objects
+of her anxiety, when Felix came in.
+
+Mr. Wentworth sat there, with his legs crossed, lifting his dry,
+pure countenance from the Boston "Advertiser."  Felix entered smiling,
+as if he had something particular to say, and his uncle looked at him
+as if he both expected and deprecated this event.  Felix vividly
+expressing himself had come to be a formidable figure to his uncle,
+who had not yet arrived at definite views as to a proper tone.
+For the first time in his life, as I have said, Mr. Wentworth shirked
+a responsibility; he earnestly desired that it might not be laid upon him
+to determine how his nephew's lighter propositions should be treated.
+He lived under an apprehension that Felix might yet beguile him
+into assent to doubtful inductions, and his conscience instructed him
+that the best form of vigilance was the avoidance of discussion.
+He hoped that the pleasant episode of his nephew's visit would pass
+away without a further lapse of consistency.
+
+Felix looked at Charlotte with an air of understanding,
+and then at Mr. Wentworth, and then at Charlotte again.
+Mr. Wentworth bent his refined eyebrows upon his nephew
+and stroked down the first page of the "Advertiser."
+"I ought to have brought a bouquet," said Felix, laughing.
+"In France they always do."
+
+"We are not in France," observed Mr. Wentworth, gravely, while Charlotte
+earnestly gazed at him.
+
+"No, luckily, we are not in France, where I am afraid I
+should have a harder time of it.  My dear Charlotte, have you
+rendered me that delightful service?"  And Felix bent toward
+her as if some one had been presenting him.
+
+Charlotte looked at him with almost frightened eyes; and Mr. Wentworth thought
+this might be the beginning of a discussion.  "What is the bouquet for?"
+he inquired, by way of turning it off.
+
+Felix gazed at him, smiling.  "Pour la demande!"
+And then, drawing up a chair, he seated himself, hat in hand,
+with a kind of conscious solemnity.
+
+Presently he turned to Charlotte again.  "My good Charlotte,
+my admirable Charlotte," he murmured, "you have not played me false--
+you have not sided against me?"
+
+Charlotte got up, trembling extremely, though imperceptibly.
+"You must speak to my father yourself," she said.
+"I think you are clever enough."
+
+But Felix, rising too, begged her to remain.  "I can speak better
+to an audience!" he declared.
+
+"I hope it is nothing disagreeable," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"It 's something delightful, for me!"  And Felix, laying down his hat,
+clasped his hands a little between his knees.  "My dear uncle,"
+he said, "I desire, very earnestly, to marry your daughter Gertrude."
+Charlotte sank slowly into her chair again, and Mr. Wentworth
+sat staring, with a light in his face that might have been flashed
+back from an iceberg.  He stared and stared; he said nothing.
+Felix fell back, with his hands still clasped.  "Ah--you don't like it.
+I was afraid!"  He blushed deeply, and Charlotte noticed it--
+remarking to herself that it was the first time she had ever seen
+him blush.  She began to blush herself and to reflect that he might
+be much in love.
+
+"This is very abrupt," said Mr. Wentworth, at last.
+
+"Have you never suspected it, dear uncle?"  Felix inquired.
+"Well, that proves how discreet I have been.  Yes, I thought
+you would n't like it."
+
+"It is very serious, Felix," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"You think it 's an abuse of hospitality!" exclaimed Felix, smiling again.
+
+"Of hospitality?--an abuse?" his uncle repeated very slowly.
+
+"That is what Felix said to me," said Charlotte, conscientiously.
+
+"Of course you think so; don't defend yourself!"  Felix pursued.
+"It is an abuse, obviously; the most I can claim is that it
+is perhaps a pardonable one.  I simply fell head over heels
+in love; one can hardly help that.  Though you are Gertrude's
+progenitor I don't believe you know how attractive she is.
+Dear uncle, she contains the elements of a singularly--
+I may say a strangely--charming woman!"
+
+"She has always been to me an object of extreme concern," said Mr. Wentworth.
+"We have always desired her happiness."
+
+"Well, here it is!"  Felix declared.  "I will make her happy.
+She believes it, too.  Now had n't you noticed that?"
+
+"I had noticed that she was much changed," Mr. Wentworth declared,
+in a tone whose unexpressive, unimpassioned quality appeared
+to Felix to reveal a profundity of opposition.  "It may be that she
+is only becoming what you call a charming woman."
+
+"Gertrude, at heart, is so earnest, so true," said Charlotte,
+very softly, fastening her eyes upon her father.
+
+"I delight to hear you praise her!" cried Felix.
+
+"She has a very peculiar temperament," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"Eh, even that is praise!"  Felix rejoined.  "I know I am
+not the man you might have looked for.  I have no position
+and no fortune; I can give Gertrude no place in the world.
+A place in the world--that 's what she ought to have;
+that would bring her out."
+
+"A place to do her duty!" remarked Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"Ah, how charmingly she does it--her duty!"  Felix exclaimed,
+with a radiant face.  "What an exquisite conception she
+has of it!  But she comes honestly by that, dear uncle."
+Mr. Wentworth and Charlotte both looked at him as if they were
+watching a greyhound doubling.  "Of course with me she will hide
+her light under a bushel," he continued; "I being the bushel!
+Now I know you like me--you have certainly proved it.
+But you think I am frivolous and penniless and shabby!
+Granted--granted--a thousand times granted.
+I have been a loose fish--a fiddler, a painter, an actor.
+But there is this to be said:  In the first place, I fancy
+you exaggerate; you lend me qualities I have n't had.
+I have been a Bohemian--yes; but in Bohemia I always passed
+for a gentleman.  I wish you could see some of my old camarades--
+they would tell you!  It was the liberty I liked,
+but not the opportunities!  My sins were all peccadilloes;
+I always respected my neighbor's property--my neighbor's wife.
+Do you see, dear uncle?"  Mr. Wentworth ought to have seen;
+his cold blue eyes were intently fixed.  "And then, c'est fini!
+It 's all over.  Je me range.  I have settled down to a
+jog-trot. I find I can earn my living--a very fair one--
+by going about the world and painting bad portraits.  It 's not
+a glorious profession, but it is a perfectly respectable one.
+You won't deny that, eh?  Going about the world, I say?
+I must not deny that, for that I am afraid I shall always do--
+in quest of agreeable sitters.  When I say agreeable,
+I mean susceptible of delicate flattery and prompt of payment.
+Gertrude declares she is willing to share my wanderings and help
+to pose my models.  She even thinks it will be charming;
+and that brings me to my third point.  Gertrude likes me.
+Encourage her a little and she will tell you so."
+
+Felix's tongue obviously moved much faster than the imagination
+of his auditors; his eloquence, like the rocking of a boat
+in a deep, smooth lake, made long eddies of silence.
+And he seemed to be pleading and chattering still, with his
+brightly eager smile, his uplifted eyebrows, his expressive mouth,
+after he had ceased speaking, and while, with his glance
+quickly turning from the father to the daughter, he sat waiting
+for the effect of his appeal.  "It is not your want of means,"
+said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence.
+
+"Now it 's delightful of you to say that!  Only don't say
+it 's my want of character.  Because I have a character--
+I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing,
+but still something tangible."
+
+"Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?"
+Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness.
+
+"It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared.
+And he looked at his knee for a long time.  "It is difficult
+to explain," he said.  He wished, evidently, to be very just.
+"It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says.
+It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude."
+
+"What is better--what is better, dear uncle?"  Felix rejoined urgently,
+rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth.
+His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved
+he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him.
+"It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man
+she loves!" cried Felix.
+
+While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin
+to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix
+had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted.
+Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there.
+She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes.
+She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing
+the door softly, looked round at the three persons present.
+Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out
+his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa.
+But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion
+to sit down.
+
+"We are talking of you!" said Felix.
+
+"I know it," she answered.  "That 's why I came."  And she fastened
+her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly.
+In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light.
+
+"It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth.
+"We are discussing your future."
+
+"Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude.  "Leave it to me."
+
+"That is, to me!" cried Felix.
+
+"I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours,"
+said the old man.
+
+Felix rubbed his forehead gently.  "But en attendant the last resort,
+your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude.
+
+"Have n't you confidence in Felix?"  Gertrude was frowning; there was
+something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen.
+Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her;
+but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her.
+
+Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid.  "I have had more confidence
+in Felix than in you," he said.
+
+"Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never!
+I don't know why."
+
+"Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte.
+
+"You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared.
+"You have had a difficult temperament."
+
+"Why do you call it difficult?  It might have been easy,
+if you had allowed it.  You would n't let me be natural.
+I don't know what you wanted to make of me.  Mr. Brand
+was the worst."
+
+Charlotte at last took hold of her sister.  She laid her
+two hands upon Gertrude's arm.  "He cares so much for you,"
+she almost whispered.
+
+Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her.
+"No, he does not," she said.
+
+"I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth,
+with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles.
+
+"I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude.
+
+"You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry."
+
+"Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte.
+
+"I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed.
+"I would question whether she really offends you.
+How can she offend you?"
+
+To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer.  Then, in a moment,
+"She has not profited as we hoped."
+
+"Profited?  Ah voila!"  Felix exclaimed.
+
+Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down.  "I have told Felix I would
+go away with him," she presently said.
+
+"Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man.
+
+"Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte.
+
+"Away--away; to some strange country."
+
+"That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte.
+
+"To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant
+to Felix.  "To Bohemia."
+
+"Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?"
+asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up.
+
+"Dear uncle, vous plaisantez!" cried Felix.  "It seems to me
+that these are preliminaries."
+
+Gertrude turned to her father.  "I have profited," she said.
+"You wanted to form my character.  Well, my character
+is formed--for my age.  I know what I want; I have chosen.
+I am determined to marry this gentleman."
+
+"You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently.
+
+"Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice.
+
+Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction
+from which it had come.  It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had
+stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza.
+He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief;
+he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression.
+
+"Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward.
+"I know what Miss Gertrude means."
+
+"My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly
+on the young minister's arm.
+
+Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude.
+He did not look at Charlotte.  But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened
+to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it.
+The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the
+elements of it were there.  It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand
+was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright,
+excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has
+taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure,
+not of his moral, but of his personal, resources.  Charlotte thought
+he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt
+very grand.  This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life;
+and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities
+of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man.
+
+"Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand.
+"It is very proper that you should be present."
+
+"I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined.
+"I heard what your nephew said."
+
+"And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again
+on the arm.
+
+"I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth,
+who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures.
+
+Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor.
+She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination
+moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you
+to let Felix take me away," she said to her father.
+
+The young minister gave her a strange look.  "It is not because I
+don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended
+as it were for publicity.
+
+"I should n't think you would want to see me any more,"
+Gertrude answered, gently.
+
+Mr. Wentworth stood staring.  "Is n't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes, sir."  And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte.
+"Yes, sir," he repeated.  And he held his handkerchief a few moments
+to his lips.
+
+"Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth,
+who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing
+for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament.
+
+"It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix.
+
+Charlotte had softly left her sister's side.  She had edged gently
+toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm.
+Mr. Wentworth had folded up the "Advertiser" into a surprisingly
+small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly
+clasped it with the other.  Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet,
+though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own.
+Gertrude watched her sister.
+
+"It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand.
+"In one sense there is no change.  There was something I desired--
+something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you."
+And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered.
+"I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite
+this young couple."
+
+Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely,
+and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm.  "Heavenly Powers!"
+murmured Mr. Wentworth.  And it was the nearest approach to profanity
+he had ever made.
+
+"That is very nice; that is very handsome!"  Felix exclaimed.
+
+"I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain
+that every one else did.
+
+"That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix.
+
+"I should like to marry you.  It will give me great pleasure."
+
+"As Gertrude says, it 's a beautiful idea," said Felix.
+
+Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to.
+He himself treated his proposition very seriously.
+"I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed.
+
+Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes.
+Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her
+sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps.
+"Father," she murmured, "consent!"
+
+Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away.  Mr. Wentworth, evidently,
+had no imagination at all.  "I have always thought,"
+he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special
+line of development."
+
+"Father," repeated Charlotte, "consent."
+
+Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her.  Her father felt
+her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had
+ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness
+in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter.
+He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze
+with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing,
+and he continued to be bewildered.  Nevertheless, "I consent,"
+he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it."
+
+"I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand,
+with a sort of solemn simplicity.
+
+"Come, come, that 's charming!" cried Felix, profanely.
+
+Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair.  "Doubtless, when you understand it,"
+he said, with a certain judicial asperity.
+
+Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed
+his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him,
+the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity.
+
+Felix did no work that day.  In the afternoon, with Gertrude,
+he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars.
+They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively.
+
+"That was a fine stroke," said Felix.  "It was really heroic."
+
+Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples.
+"That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine."
+
+"He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix.
+"So much the better."
+
+"He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure.
+I know him so well," Gertrude went on.  Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly,
+gazing at the clear water.  "He thought of it a great deal, night and day.
+He thought it would be beautiful.  At last he made up his mind that it
+was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that.
+He felt exalted; he felt sublime.  That 's how he likes to feel.
+It is better for him than if I had listened to him."
+
+"It 's better for me," smiled Felix.  "But do you know,
+as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you
+when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done
+a fortnight before?"
+
+"He never admired me.  He admires Charlotte; he pitied me.
+I know him so well."
+
+"Well, then, he did n't pity you so much."
+
+Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling.  "You should n't
+permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action.
+He admires Charlotte," she repeated.
+
+"That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars.
+I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded;
+but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about.
+
+Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at
+Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast.  The two occupants
+of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed
+his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact.
+Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as
+reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother,
+his wife would have nothing to complain of.
+
+Felix looked at her a moment, smiling.  "I hope," he said,
+"not to be thrown back on my reason."
+
+"It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat.
+It 's a bed with the mattress removed."
+
+But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to
+the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective
+sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza,
+with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton;
+and as every one stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness,
+Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude.
+
+Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of
+the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she
+acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation.
+
+"I shall be so glad to know you better," she said;
+"I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked.
+Naturally; now I see the reason why!  You will love me a little,
+won't you?  I think I may say I gain on being known."
+And terminating these observations with the softest cadence
+of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official
+kiss upon Gertrude's forehead.
+
+Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination,
+diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality,
+and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony.
+Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many
+of the gracious manifestations of Madame Munster's wit.
+
+They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion
+he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came
+back and leaned against his column.  Eugenia was now complimenting
+her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth
+was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness.
+It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual
+relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute;
+but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not
+at all exhilarated.
+
+"Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia.
+"He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--
+indestructible gayety."
+
+"You think that 's a great quality?" asked the old man.
+
+Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his.  "You think one gets tired
+of it, eh?"
+
+"I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+"Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for
+one's self.  A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self;
+so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gayety will be a common property."
+
+"Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth.
+He was trying to follow this argument.
+
+Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little
+nearer to the Baroness.  "You say you gain by being known," he said.
+"One certainly gains by knowing you."
+
+"What have you gained?" asked Eugenia.
+
+"An immense amount of wisdom."
+
+"That 's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!"
+
+Acton shook his head.  "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!"
+
+"And being a fool you made my acquaintance?  You are very complimentary."
+
+"Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing.  "I hope, for our pleasure,
+that your brother's marriage will detain you."
+
+"Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop
+for my own?" asked the Baroness.
+
+"Why should n't you stop in either case, now that, as you say,
+you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?"
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment.  "As I say?
+You look as if you doubted it."
+
+"Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly!
+We have other attractions," he added.  "We are to have another marriage."
+
+But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still.
+"My word was never doubted before," she said.
+
+"We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling.
+
+Then she appeared to understand.  "Another marriage?"
+And she looked at the others.  Felix was chattering to Gertrude;
+Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand,
+in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and,
+with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side,
+was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon.
+"It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia,
+"but it does n't look like it."
+
+"There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries.
+There is more than there looks to be.  I expect that combination
+one of these days; but that is not what I meant."
+
+"Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers;
+so I can't guess other people's."
+
+Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when
+Mr. Wentworth approached his niece.  "You will be interested to hear,"
+the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity,
+"of another matrimonial venture in our little circle."
+
+"I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed.
+
+"Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia.
+
+Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased.  "It is not exactly that;
+but it is in the family.  Clifford, hearing this morning
+that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial
+knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that,
+while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like
+ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton."
+
+The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle;
+then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am
+certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said.
+Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had
+perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation,
+and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more.  It had been,
+in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself.
+This was done, however, promptly enough.  "Where are the
+young people?" she asked.
+
+"They are spending the evening with my mother."
+
+"Is not the thing very sudden?"
+
+Acton looked up.  "Extremely sudden.  There had been a tacit understanding;
+but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious
+impulse to precipitate the affair."
+
+"The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister."
+
+"But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her."
+Acton had begun to experiment again.
+
+Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him.
+"Ah, one can't say!  Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy."
+
+"He 's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man."
+This was Acton's last experiment.  Madame Munster turned away.
+
+She made but a short visit and Felix took her home.  In her little
+drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the
+chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it.
+"I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother.
+"To-morrow my maid shall pack up."
+
+"My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately!
+Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable."
+
+But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked
+about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions.
+"My maid shall pack up," she repeated.  "Bonte divine, what rubbish!
+I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'  "
+
+"Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix.
+
+She gave him a sharp glance.  "I have spoken my part."
+
+"With great applause!" said her brother.
+
+"Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured.  And she gathered up two or three of
+her dispersed draperies.  She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then,
+"I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said.
+
+"Endure it a little longer.  Come to my wedding."
+
+"Thank you; that 's your affair.  My affairs are elsewhere."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To Germany--by the first ship."
+
+"You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?"
+
+"I have refused him," said Eugenia.
+
+Her brother looked at her in silence.  "I am sorry," he rejoined at last.
+"But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be.  I said nothing.  "
+
+"Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia.
+
+Felix inclined himself gravely.  "You shall be obeyed.
+But your position in Germany?" he pursued.
+
+"Please to make no observations upon it."
+
+"I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered."
+
+"You are mistaken."
+
+"But I thought you had signed"--
+
+"I have not signed!" said the Baroness.
+
+Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately
+assist her to embark.
+
+Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice
+and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely;
+but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not
+found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken.
+It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared
+to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions
+of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really
+superior women.  The elder world was, after all, their natural field.
+The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these
+intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who
+have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character
+to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy.
+It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days
+preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal.
+She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been
+more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride
+she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her
+with the prettiest speech and kiss.  Gertrude, who as an affianced
+bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little
+incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did
+not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer
+in return a handsome present to the Baroness.  It would have made him
+extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness;
+but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were
+in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable.
+It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she
+went to Boston to embark.
+
+"For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said.
+"But not for your own sake."
+
+"I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness.
+"I am simply sorry to be going."
+
+"That 's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared;
+"for you mean you are simply glad!"
+
+Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship.  "We shall often
+meet over there," he said.
+
+"I don't know," she answered.  "Europe seems to me much larger than America."
+
+Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed,
+was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all
+the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly
+to the level of the occasion.  Gertrude left her father's house with
+Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away.
+Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle,
+and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify,
+strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse
+with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth.
+Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came
+back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand.  She was present at
+the wedding feast, where Felix's gayety confessed to no change.
+Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gayety of her own, mingled with
+that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years.
+Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton,
+after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl.
+
+The End
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Europeans by Henry James
+
+