tory, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of
the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have
dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie
scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the
colour--of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good
faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same
time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these
people's, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of
which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts
while he loitered--what he had further said came back to him, for it had
been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always
with him. "You Americans are almost incredibly romantic."

"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us."

"Everything?" He had wondered.

"Well, everything that's nice at all. The world, the beautiful,
world--or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much."

He had looked at her a moment--and he well knew how she had struck him,
in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the
most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: "You see too
much--that's what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don't,
at least," he had amended with a further thought, "see too little."
But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning
perhaps was needless.

He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed
somehow no follies in theirs--nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but
innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was
a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny
thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older
and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad--that is as good--as
herself.

"Oh, he's better," the girl had freely declared "that is he's worse.
His relation to the things he cares for--and I think it beautiful--is
absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over here--it's the most
romantic thing I know."

"You mean his idea for his native place?"

"Yes--the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and
of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world.
It's the work of his life and the motive of everything he does."

The young man, in his actual mood, cou