o be afraid of
Rose, of whose brilliancy she had heard a little too much to make the
idea of meeting her quite comfortable.

The party had just gathered in the sitting-room as they entered. Clover
and Elsie were in pretty cotton dresses, as usual, and Rose, following
their lead, had put on what at home she would have considered a morning
gown, of linen lawn, white, with tiny bunches of forget-me-nots
scattered over it, and a jabot of lace and blue ribbon. These toilettes
seemed unduly simple to Imogen, who said within herself, complacently,
"There is one thing the Americans don't seem to understand, and that is
the difference between common dressing and a regular dinner
dress,"--preening herself the while in the sky-blue mousselaine-de-laine,
and quite unconscious that Rose was inwardly remarking, "My! where _did_
she get that gown? I never saw anything like it. It must have been made
for Mrs. Noah, some years before the ark. And her hair! just the ark
style, too, and calculated to frighten the animals into good behavior
and obedience during the bad weather. Well, I put it at the head of all
the extraordinary things I ever saw."

It is just as well, on the whole, that people are not able to read each
other's thoughts in society.

"You've only just come to America, I hear," said Rose, taking a chair
near Imogen. "Do you begin to feel at home yet?"

"Oh, pretty well for that. I don't fancy that one ever gets to be quite
at home anywhere out of their own country. It's very different over here
from England, of course."

"Yes, but some parts of America are more different than some other
parts. You haven't seen much of us as yet."

"No, but all the parts I have seen seemed very much alike."

"The High Valley and New York, for example."

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of New York. I mean the plains and mountains and
the Western towns. We didn't stop at any of them, of course; but seen
from the railway they all look pretty much the same,--wooden houses, you
know, and all that."

"What astonished us most was the distance," said Rose. "Of course we all
learned from our maps, when we were at school, just how far it is across
the continent; but I never realized it in the least till I saw it. It
seemed so wonderful to go on day after day and never get to the end!"

"Only about half-way to the end," put in Clover. "That question of
distance is a great surprise; and if it perplexes you, Rose, it isn't
wonderful that it should perp