truly domestic, with the same straightness and se
curity; she attached her fur boa with the same
honest precautions; she preserved her balance on
the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she
opened, each evening, her " Transcript " with the
same interfusion of suspense and resignation; she
attended her almost daily concert with the same
expenditure of patience and the same economy of
passion; she flitted in and out of the Public Library
with the air of conscientiously returning or bravely
carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge it
self; and finally it was what she most did she
watched the thin trickle of a fktive " love-interest"
through that somewhat serpentine channel, in the
magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear
for it. But the real thing, all the while, was else
where; the real thing had gone back to New York,
leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
distinct, of why it was real, and whether she should
ever be so near it again.

For the figure to whicn these questions attached
themselves she had found a convenient description
she thought of it for herself, always, as that of a
girl with a background. The great reality was in
the fact that, very soon, after but two or three
meetings, the girl with the background, the girl
with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once
more rebellious in its gloom and more frivolous in
its frills, had told her she had never seen any one

[[121]]

p120 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p121w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p122

v?