s and
half-foreigners and quarter-foreigners and all their ways. I was hungry
for home-folks and didn't know it. Now, please God, we'll have some talk
where we know that when we use the same words we mean the same thing,
and aren't wondering all the time what's really in the other's mind!"

The man to whom this was said absorbed it with a face fixed in smiles of
pleasure. He was a big blond man, disposed to corpulence, and looking
somewhat like a fresh-faced, gigantic boy until his eye met yours and
gave the note of a fine, mature intelligence, open on every side, and
unobtrusively gathering in what it had no strong impulse afterward to
give out again in any open form of self-expression.

Tolerant, not from any vagueness of judgment; easy to get on with, but
not to drive or to deceive, he looked strikingly the good fellow, yet
kept you in respect. An air of capability, a consciousness of definite
achievements, went coupled in him with the humor that would prevent
bumptiousness however great the matter for pride. A quiet carelessness
of other people's opinions formed part of his effect of poise; the
opinions of dukes would have affected him as little as those of
rag-pickers, unless they recommended themselves to that judicial spot in
his brain at which he tried them. He was level-headed, unsentimental,
but kind, of a kindness that like good-humor seemed almost physical, and
made him stop to stroke the kitchen cat as well as see to it that the
negress's baby had the right milk for its orphaned stomach.

He looked at Aurora with smiling scrutiny, and facially expressed a vast
appreciation. She looked back at him with eyes of laughing tenderness.
Avoiding to speak directly to her the compliments rising in his mind, he
turned to Estelle.

"Hasn't she blossomed out!"

"Isn't she wonderful?" chimed in that friend, enthusiastically.

Aurora, with a comedy of pride, threw up her chin, lifted her arms, and
turned as if on a pivot, to show herself off in her elegance. She had on
the wine-colored street-dress bordered with black fox; over its white
satin waistcoat embroidered with gold hung in a splendid loop her pink
corals. The restraining Paris corset gave to her luxuriant form a
charming modish correctness of line.

"Oh, Tom,"--she sank happily on the sofa beside him,--"we're having the
time of our lives! Just wait till you see me in company, and hear me put
on my good English, when, instead of calling things lovely or h