y; and I'm all intensity, and no repose. But I'm no more
like my mother than Alice is like me."

"I think she has the Hibbins face," said Mrs. Saintsbury.

"Oh! she's got the Hibbins face," said Mrs Pasmer, with a disdain of
tone which she did not at all feel; the tone was mere absent-mindedness.

She was about to revert to the question of Mavering's family, when
the door-bell rang, and another visitor interrupted her talk with Mrs.
Saintsbury.

IX.

Mrs. Pasmer's husband looked a great deal older than herself, and, by
operation of a well-known law of compensation, he was lean and silent,
while she was plump and voluble. He had thick eyebrows, which remained
black after his hair and beard had become white, and which gave him an
aspect of fierceness, expressive of nothing in his character. It was
from him that their daughter got her height, and, as Mrs. Pasmer freely
owned, her distinction.

Soon after their marriage the Pasmers had gone to live in Paris, where
they remained faithful to the fortunes of the Second Empire till its
fall, with intervals of return to their own country of a year or two
years at a time. After the fall of the Empire they made their sojourn
in England, where they lived upon the edges and surfaces of things, as
Americans must in Europe everywhere, but had more permanency of feeling
than they had known in France, and something like a real social status.
At one time it seemed as if they might end their days there; but that
which makes Americans different from all other peoples, and which
finally claims their allegiance for their own land, made them wish to
come back to America, and to come back to Boston. After all, their place
in England was strictly inferior, and must be. They knew titles, and
consorted with them, but they had none themselves, and the English
constancy which kept their friends faithful to them after they had
become an old story, was correlated with the English honesty which
never permitted them to mistake themselves for even the lowest of the
nobility. They went out last, and they did not come in first, ever.

The invitations, upon these conditions, might have gone on indefinitely,
but they did not imply a future for the young girl in whom the interests
of her parents centred. After being so long a little girl, she had
become a great girl, and then all at once she had become a young
lady. They had to ask themselves, the mother definitely and the father
formlessly, wh