regulated and well-bred young woman--and Miss Bascombe was
both--ever permits herself to remember any man until she is engaged to
him; but she need not forget one that has impressed her agreeably. Miss
Bascombe had not forgotten the handsome Englishman she had met at Jenny
De Witt's, nor the little lecture she had given him on the duties of
brothers to sisters, and it did not strike her that his inaugural
address was at all eccentric or mysterious. He had been told what he
ought to do; he had tried to do it, as was quite right and proper. He
deserved some reward. And he got it,--though only as an encouragement to
abstract virtue, of course. The young lady was pleased to be friendly,
gracious, charming. Her mother came in presently, was equally friendly
and gracious, and almost as charming. Her father came home to dinner,
and was friendly too, and hearty, and very hospitable. Her brothers were
friendliest of all. He knew quite well that he had no claim on them,
that he had not saved the life of any member of the family or laid them
under any sort of obligation, individually or collectively, and no
reception could have seemed more special and dangerously cordial, yet no
anxieties oppressed, no fears distracted him. The weight of excessive
eligibility suddenly slipped off him, like the albatross from the neck
of the Ancient Mariner, leaving him a thankful and a happy man, and in
a week he had established himself firmly at the Bascombes', declined to
accompany his uncle to Virginia, and definitely settled in his own mind
that he would take the step matrimonial,--the step from the sublime
to--well, not always the ridiculous. With this resolution he naturally
thought that the greatest obstacle to success had been removed; but he
was soon disillusionized. He had already come to see that American girls
were very much in the habit of being gracious to everybody, and saying
pretty and pleasant things, with no thought of an hereafter; also that
they did not live with St. George's, Hanover Square, or its American
equivalent, Trinity Church, New York, stamped on the mental retina. Miss
Bascombe was "very nice" to him, he told himself, but she was quite as
nice to a dozen other men. She was uniformly kind, courteous, agreeable,
to every one who came to the house. Her cordiality to him meant nothing
whatever. Yes, he was quite free,--free as air; he saw that plainly, and
perversely longed to assume the fetters he had so long and so skilf