was able to tell him just
how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and
what had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up
in her boy, and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to
Switzerland, after the summer's travel, and settling down with him at
school there. She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his
mother called him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a
celebrity of the first grade in his quality of editor of 'Every Other
Week', but as a sage of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose
the chance of counsel upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged
in contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the
poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in 'Every Other
Week', and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let
the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any
author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy
confessed to have had. They were so near in age, though they were ten
years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others
much more his seniors. He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he
valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March
upon Kenby's practice of always taking up the language of the country
he visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher
opinion of him from March's approval.

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when
he supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could
get him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he
poured out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of
what he had written and what he meant to write. When he passed them
where they sat together, March heard the young fellow's perpetually
recurring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she
was suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the
pivotal girl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to him, in which a less
penetrating scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal.
It was only at table that she could see them together, or that she could
note any break in the reserve of the father and daughter. The signs of
this were so fine th