r from you."

Of course I had to answer that, and worse, to show it to the girls. Some
men, now, would keep it to themselves, and preserve their dignity; but
such is not my style. Let them crow over me if they must.

They did. "Well, Robert," said Mabel, "you see now how absurdly mistaken
you were. Perhaps hereafter you will allow us to manage our own affairs,
and not complicate them with your bungling masculine attempts at
superior wisdom." "I am glad to know, brother," said Jane, "that your
friend is a gentleman, incapable of the base suspicions you would have
attributed to him. You did your best to prevent our knowing him and
carrying out your ideas for his improvement: now we shall be able to
meet him cordially, and try to cheer him a little. But probably he is
not at all as dark as you have painted him."

Clarice would say nothing: she was in one of her high and mighty moods.
Her soul is like a star, and sits up aloft; sometimes it twinkles, but
more generally it does not. I often want to tell her that she is a
creature too bright and good to come to breakfast like other folks; but
somehow she has a way of keeping people at a distance, and even of
repressing my pleasantries. We call her the Princess: She has to be
approached with bated breath, and you must whisper your compliments if
you want to fire them off at her; rear them as gently as a sucking
child, in fact--and then they are very seldom appreciated.

"Clarice," I said, "I want to get Hartman down here. Do treat him
kindly, please; won't you, now?"

She looked at me with her Juno air. "Why should I treat him kindly?"

"O well, I won't say for my sake, because you wouldn't care for that.
But the poor devil has lived in the woods so long."

"He might have been well enough in his woods; but why should you bring
your poor devils into civilized society, and expect me to bear with
their gaucheries, in addition to your own?"

There it is: she'll not forgive me in a year for upsetting her fine plan
of going up there to beard the hermit in his den. She rarely takes these
fancies, I must own; and when she does, she is not accustomed to be
balked of them. As it has turned out, I might as well have let her have
her way that time; there was no harm in it. "Princess, haven't you
trampled on me enough? I was wrong, and I'm very sorry: what more can a
man say? But Hartman had no hand in that."

"Yes, that is clear now, no thanks to you. Small merit in confessing
a