The Europeans, by Henry James

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Title: The Europeans

Author: Henry James

Release Date: March 14, 2006 [EBook #179]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger





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 vulgar 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 disagreements 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
Nuremberg 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 faisance, 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-a-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?"

Fe