sed and flattered him to feel that he could afford, morally
speaking, to have a kittenish wife. He had within himself a fund of
common sense to draw upon, so that to espouse a paragon of wisdom would
be but to carry water to the fountain. He could easily make up for the
deficiencies of a wife who was a little silly, and if she charmed and
amused him, he could treat himself to the luxury of these sensations for
themselves. He was not in the least afraid of being ruined by it, and if
Blanche's birdlike chatter and turns of the head had made a fool of him,
he knew it perfectly well, and simply took his stand upon his rights.
Every man has a right to a little flower-bed, and life is not all mere
kitchen-gardening. Bernard rapidly extemporized this rough explanation
of the surprise his friend had offered him, and he found it
all-sufficient for his immediate needs. He wrote Blanche a charming
note, to which she replied with a great deal of spirit and grace. Her
little letter was very prettily turned, and Bernard, reading it over two
or three times, said to himself that, to do her justice, she might very
well have polished her intellect a trifle during these two or three
years. As she was older, she could hardly help being wiser. It even
occurred to Bernard that she might have profited by the sort of
experience that is known as the discipline of suffering. What had become
of Captain Lovelock and that tender passion which was apparently none
the less genuine for having been expressed in the slang of a humorous
period? Had they been permanently separated by judicious guardians, and
had she been obliged to obliterate his image from her lightly-beating
little heart? Bernard had felt sure at Baden that, beneath her
contemptuous airs and that impertinent consciousness of the difficulties
of conquest by which a pretty American girl attests her allegiance to a
civilization in which young women occupy the highest place--he had felt
sure that Blanche had a high appreciation of her handsome Englishman,
and that if Lovelock should continue to relish her charms, he might
count upon the advantages of reciprocity. But it occurred to Bernard
that Captain Lovelock had perhaps been faithless; that, at least, the
discourtesy of chance and the inhumanity of an elder brother might have
kept him an eternal prisoner at the Hotel de Hollande (where, for
all Bernard knew to the contrary, he had been obliged to work out his
destiny in the arduous charact