them with a
satisfaction in the result which could not be represented without
an effect of caricature. They measured Alice's romance together, and
evolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion,
which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with his
simple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of the
room, and sitting down with his arm around Alice's waist. When he had
accomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think,
to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be made
to see at such times how their lives could be more in unison than
they were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knew
was disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hinted
at anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it was
disagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that she
perceived he could not have given the least thought to it.

She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; their
pleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it was
charming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, she
felt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so,
that it was all wrong.

"But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call them
so," suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice's misgivings over with her,
"aren't they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn't
it what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are such
perfect counterparts--"

"Yes," the girl assented, "that's what we're taught to believe." She
meant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in such
matters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.

She kept on writing to Dan's mother, though more and more perfunctorily;
and now Eunice and now Minnie Mavering acknowledged her letters. She
knew that they must think she was silly, but having entered by Dan's
connivance upon her folly, she was too proud to abandon it.

At last, after she had ceased to expect it, came a letter from his
mother, not a brief note, but a letter which the invalid had evidently
tasked herself to make long and full, in recognition of Alice's kindness
in writing to her so much. The girl opened it, and, after a verifying
glance at the signature, began to read it with a thrill of tender
triumph, and the fond prevision of the greater ple