uch laughing good-humor with the world, as if
a summer holiday was just a holiday without any consequences or
responsibilities. It was to him a serious affair ever since that
unsatisfactory note from Miss Benson; somehow the summer had lost its
sparkle. And yet was it not preposterous that a girl, just a single
girl, should have the power to change for a man the aspect of a whole
coast-by her presence to make it iridescent with beauty, and by her
absence to take all the life out of it? And a simple girl from Ohio!
She was not by any means the prettiest girl in the Newport Casino that
morning, but it was her figure that he remembered, and it was the look
of hurt sensibility in her eyes that stayed with him. He resented the
attitude of the Casino towards her, and he hated himself for his share
in it. He would write to her..... He composed letter after letter in his
mind, which he did not put on paper. How many millions of letters are
composed in this way! It is a favorite occupation of imaginative people;
and as they say that no thoughts or mental impressions are ever lost,
but are all registered--made, as it were, on a "dry-plate," to be
developed hereafter--what a vast correspondence must be lying in the
next world, in the Dead-letter Office there, waiting for the persons to
whom it is addressed, who will all receive it and read it some day! How
unpleasant and absurd it will be to read, much of it! I intend to be
careful, for my part, about composing letters of this sort hereafter.
Irene, I dare say, will find a great many of them from Mr. King, thought
out in those days. But he mailed none of them to her. What should he
say? Should he tell her that he didn't mind if her parents were what
Mrs. Bartlett Glow called "impossible"? If he attempted any explanation,
would it not involve the offensive supposition that his social rank
was different from hers? Even if he convinced her that he recognized no
caste in American society, what could remove from her mind the somewhat
morbid impression that her education had put her in a false position?
His love probably could not shield her from mortification in a society
which, though indefinable in its limits and code, is an entity more
vividly felt than the government of the United States.

"Don't you think the whole social atmosphere has changed," Miss
Lamont suddenly asked, as they were running along in the train towards
Manchester-by-the-Sea, "since we got north of Boston? I seem