y?"

This question had not occurred to Clementina. "I don't believe she
will," she said, thoughtfully.

"Shall you?"

Clementina laughed, "Why, do you think," she ventured, "that society
would want me to?"

"Yes, I think it would, if you're as charming as you've tried to make me
believe. Oh, I don't mean, to your own knowledge; but some people have
ways of being charming without knowing it. If Mrs. Lander isn't going
into society, and there should be a way found for you to go, don't
refuse, will you?"

"I shall wait and see if I'm asked, fust."

"Yes, that will be best," said Milray. "But I shall give you a letter to
my sister. She and I used to be famous cronies, and we went to a great
many parties together when we were young people. We thought the world
was a fine thing, then. But it changes."

He fell into a muse, and they were both sitting quite silent when Mrs.
Milray came round the corner of the music room in the course of her
twentieth or thirtieth compass of the deck, and introduced her lord to
her husband and to Clementina. He promptly ignored Milray, and devoted
himself to the girl, leaning over her with his hand against the bulkhead
behind her and talking down upon her.

Lord Lioncourt must have been about thirty, but he had the heated and
broken complexion of a man who has taken more than is good for him in
twice that number of years. This was one of the wrongs nature had done
him in apparent resentment of the social advantages he was born to, for
he was rather abstemious, as Englishmen go. He looked a very shy person
till he spoke, and then you found that he was not in the least shy. He
looked so English that you would have expected a strong English accent
of him, but his speech was more that of an American, without the
nasality. This was not apparently because he had been much in America;
he was returning from his first visit to the States, which had been
spent chiefly in the Territories; after a brief interval of Newport
he had preferred the West; he liked rather to hunt than to be hunted,
though even in the West his main business had been to kill time, which
he found more plentiful there than other game. The natives, everywhere,
were much the same thing to him; if he distinguished it was in favor
of those who did not suppose themselves cultivated. If again he had a
choice it was for the females; they seemed to him more amusing than the
males, who struck him as having an exaggerated reputation f