rs conversing with
her in the little salon overlooking the garden, to return to their
hotels and jot down paragraphs on the superiority of the American
women over the men. These particular foreigners did not lay eyes on Mr.
Durrett, who was in Florida or in the East playing polo or engaged in
some other pursuit. One result of the lavishness and luxury that amazed
them they wrote--had been to raise the standard of culture of the women,
who were our leisure class. But the travellers did not remain long
enough to arrive at any conclusions of value on the effect of luxury and
lavishness on the sacred institution of marriage.

If Mr. Nathaniel Durrett could have returned to his native city after
fifteen years or so in the grave, not the least of the phenomena to
startle him would have been that which was taking place in his own
house. For he would have beheld serenely established in that former
abode of Calvinism one of the most reprehensible of exotic abominations,
a 'mariage de convenance;' nor could he have failed to observe,
moreover, the complacency with which the descendants of his friends,
the pew holders in Dr. Pound's church, regarded the matter: and not only
these, but the city at large. The stronghold of Scotch Presbyterianism
had become a London or a Paris, a Gomorrah!

Mrs. Hambleton Durrett went her way, and Mr. Durrett his. The less said
about Mr. Durrett's way--even in this suddenly advanced age--the better.
As for Nancy, she seemed to the distant eye to be walking through life
in a stately and triumphant manner. I read in the newspapers of her
doings, her comings and goings; sometimes she was away for months
together, often abroad; and when she was at home I saw her, but
infrequently, under conditions more or less formal. Not that she was
formal,--or I: our intercourse seemed eloquent of an intimacy in a
tantalizing state of suspense. Would that intimacy ever be renewed? This
was a question on which I sometimes speculated. The situation that had
suspended or put an end to it, as the case might be, was never referred
to by either of us.

One afternoon in the late winter of the year following that in which
we had given a dinner to the Scherers (where the Durretts had rather
marvellously appeared together) I left my office about three o'clock--a
most unusual occurrence. I was restless, unable to fix my mind on my
work, filled with unsatisfied yearnings the object of which I sought
to keep vague, and yet I di