very theoretic," Lord Lambeth declared. "Depend upon it,
that's a Yankee prejudice."

"Happy the country," said Bessie Alden, "where even people's prejudices
are so elevated!"

"Well, after all," observed Lord Lambeth, "I don't know that I am such a
fool as you are trying to make me out."

"I said nothing so rude as that; but I must repeat that you are
disappointing."

"My dear Miss Alden," exclaimed the young man, "I am the best fellow in
the world!"

"Ah, if it were not for that!" said Bessie Alden with a smile.

Mrs. Westgate had a good many more friends in London than she pretended,
and before long she had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their
hospitality was extreme, so that, one thing leading to another, she
began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw
something of what she found it a great satisfaction to call to herself
English society. She went to balls and danced, she went to dinners and
talked, she went to concerts and listened (at concerts Bessie always
listened), she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was
keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her
opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain
celebrated persons--authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen--of
whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder, and who now, as
a part of the habitual furniture of London drawing rooms, struck her
as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable--revealing also
sometimes, on contact, qualities not to have been predicted of sidereal
bodies. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation,
had a good many personal disappointments; but, on the other hand, she
had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she communicated the
emotions of either class to a dear friend, of her own sex, in Boston,
with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her reflections,
indeed, she attempted to impart to Lord Lambeth, who came almost every
day to Jones's Hotel, and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really
devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India; and of
several others of Mrs. Westgate's ex-pensioners--gentlemen who, as she
said, had made, in New York, a clubhouse of her drawing room--no tidings
were to be obtained; but Lord Lambeth was certainly attentive enough to
make up for the accidental absences, the short memories, all the other
irregularities of everyone else.