f young men they like--alluded to his bravery (which she had never in
the least seen tested), to his honesty and gentlemanliness, and was not
silent upon the subject of his good looks. She was perfectly conscious,
moreover, that she liked to think of his more adventitious merits; that
her imagination was excited and gratified by the sight of a handsome
young man endowed with such large opportunities--opportunities she
hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things--for
setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness,
for encouraging the arts. She had a kind of ideal of conduct for a young
man who should find himself in this magnificent position, and she tried
to adapt it to Lord Lambeth's deportment as you might attempt to fit a
silhouette in cut paper upon a shadow projected upon a wall. But Bessie
Alden's silhouette refused to coincide with his lordship's image,
and this want of harmony sometimes vexed her more than she thought
reasonable. When he was absent it was, of course, less striking; then
he seemed to her a sufficiently graceful combination of high
responsibilities and amiable qualities. But when he sat there
within sight, laughing and talking with his customary good humor and
simplicity, she measured it more accurately, and she felt acutely that
if Lord Lambeth's position was heroic, there was but little of the
hero in the young man himself. Then her imagination wandered away
from him--very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at such
moments he seemed distinctly dull. I am afraid that while Bessie's
imagination was thus invidiously roaming, she cannot have been herself
a very lively companion; but it may well have been that these occasional
fits of indifference seemed to Lord Lambeth a part of the young girl's
personal charm. It had been a part of this charm from the first that
he felt that she judged him and measured him more freely and
irresponsibly--more at her ease and her leisure, as it were--than
several young ladies with whom he had been on the whole about as
intimate. To feel this, and yet to feel that she also liked him,
was very agreeable to Lord Lambeth. He fancied he had compassed that
gratification so desirable to young men of title and fortune--being
liked for himself. It is true that a cynical counselor might have
whispered to him, "Liked for yourself? Yes; but not so very much!" He
had, at any rate, the constant hope of being liked more.