e could not possibly, by
any finest insinuation, have made her a partner in her design for her
happiness. That, so far as Alice was concerned, was a thing which was to
fall to her as from heaven; for this also is part of the American plan.
We are the children of the poets, the devotees of the romancers, so far
as that goes; and however material and practical we are in other things,
in this we are a republic of shepherds and shepherdesses, and we live in
a golden age; which if it sometimes seems an age of inconvertible paper,
is certainly so through no want of faith in us.

Though the Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice's sake,
they both understood that they were going home experimentally, and not
with the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unless
they liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had no
illusions in regard to it. She had learned from her former visits home
that it was frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years which
they had spent chiefly abroad, she had observed the decay of that
distinction which formerly attended returning sojourners from Europe.
She had seen them cease gradually from the romantic reverence which
once clothed them, and decline through a gathering indifference into
something like slight and compassion, as people who have not been
able to make their place or hold their own at home; and she had
taught herself so well how to pocket the superiority natural to
the Europeanised American before arriving at consciousness of this
disesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people who had always stayed
at home.

In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for her
that she flattered adroitly always. But adroitness in flattery is not
necessary for its successful use. There is no morsel of it too gross for
the condor gullet and the ostrich stomach of human vanity; there is
no society in which it does not give the utterer instant honour
and acceptance in greater or less degree. Mrs. Pasmer, who was very
good-natured, employed it because she liked it herself, and knowing how
absolutely worthless it was from her own tongue, prized it from others.
She could have rested perfectly safe without it in her social position,
which she found unchanged by years of absence. She had not been a
Hibbins for nothing, and she was not a Pasmer for nothing, though why
she should have been either for something it would not be easy to say.

But while