time, on hot afternoons, when the clouds of dust
hung like fog, right up as high as the tops of the thin-leaved elms. The
night, I believe, is the proper season for the gentle feats of love, not
a Connecticut July afternoon, when any sort of proximity is an almost
appalling thought. But, if I never so much as kissed Florence, she let
me discover very easily, in the course of a fortnight, her simple wants.
And I could supply those wants....

She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a European
establishment. She wanted her husband to have an English accent,
an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from real estate and no
ambitions to increase that income. And--she faintly hinted--she did
not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can
envisage such unions without blinking.

She gave cut this information in floods of bright talk--she would pop a
little bit of it into comments over a view of the Rialto, Venice, and,
whilst she was brightly describing Balmoral Castle, she would say that
her ideal husband would he one who could get her received at the British
Court. She had spent, it seemed, two months in Great Britain--seven
weeks in touring from Stratford to Strathpeffer, and one as paying
guest in an old English family near Ledbury, an impoverished, but still
stately family, called Bagshawe. They were to have spent two months
more in that tranquil bosom, but inopportune events, apparently in her
uncle's business, had caused their rather hurried return to Stamford.
The young man called Jimmy had remained in Europe to perfect his
knowledge of that continent. He certainly did: he was most useful to us
afterwards.

But the point that came out--that there was no mistaking--was that
Florence was coldly and calmly determined to take no look at any man who
could not give her a European settlement. Her glimpse of English home
life had effected this. She meant, on her marriage, to have a year
in Paris, and then to have her husband buy some real estate in the
neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, from which place the Hurlbirds had come
in the year 1688. On the strength of that she was going to take her
place in the ranks of English county society. That was fixed.

I used to feel mightily elevated when I considered these details, for
I could not figure out that amongst her acquaintances in Stamford there
was any fellow that would fill the bill. The most of them were not
as wealthy as I, and those t