nt it would quite break the charm. I am just
beginning to profit, to get used to things and take them naturally. I am
sure the sight of Northampton Main Street would permanently upset me."

It was reassuring to hear that Roderick, in his own view, was but
"just beginning" to spread his wings, and Rowland, if he had had
any forebodings, might have suffered them to be modified by this
declaration. This was the first time since their meeting at Geneva that
Roderick had mentioned Miss Garland's name, but the ice being broken, he
indulged for some time afterward in frequent allusions to his
betrothed, which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied,
consideration. An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined
her to be a person of a certain age--possibly an affectionate maiden
aunt--who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated:
perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted
the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during
the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether
it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as
the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter, first
and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all
possible lights. There was something terribly hard to explain in the
fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as
Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to
fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was
particularly so in this one. Just why it was that Roderick should not
logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at
loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated
comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were
as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his
head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping
in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion. That if he
chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick's mistress,
the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case
to which poor Rowland did scanty justice. There were women, he said
to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a
little--women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating. Miss
Light, for instance, was one of these; every man