. Kenton thought that was
pretty good, and owned that she had got him there.

He laughed at her, to the children, but all the same she believed that
she was living in an atmosphere of culture, and with every breath she
was sensible of an intellectual expansion. She found herself in the
enjoyment of so wide and varied a sympathy with interests hitherto
strange to her experience that she could not easily make people believe
she had never been to Europe. Nearly every one she met had been several
times, and took it for granted that she knew the Continent as well as
they themselves.

She denied it with increasing shame; she tried to make Kenton understand
how she felt, and she might have gone further if she had not seen how
homesick he was for Tuskingum. She did her best to coax him and scold
him into a share of the pleasure they were all beginning to have in New
York. She made him own that Ellen herself was beginning to be gayer;
she convinced him that his business was not suffering in his absence and
that he was the better from the complete rest he was having. She defied
him, to say, then, what was the matter with him, and she bitterly
reproached herself, in the event, for not having known that it was not
homesickness alone that was the trouble. When he was not going about
with her, or doing something to amuse the children, he went upon long,
lonely walks, and came home silent and fagged. He had given up smoking,
and he did not care to sit about in the office of the hotel where other
old fellows passed the time over their papers and cigars, in the heat of
the glowing grates. They looked too much like himself, with their air of
unrecognized consequence, and of personal loss in an alien environment.
He knew from their dress and bearing that they were country people,
and it wounded him in a tender place to realize that they had each left
behind him in his own town an authority and a respect which they could
not enjoy in New York. Nobody called them judge, or general, or doctor,
or squire; nobody cared who they were, or what they thought; Kenton did
not care himself; but when he missed one of them he envied him, for
then he knew that he had gone back to the soft, warm keeping of his own
neighborhood, and resumed the intelligent regard of a community he had
grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former
years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let
them know he was in town, an