! but how could that be, I reflected, unsmilingly, when my views
were so infinitely superior to his!

I wondered, for one thing, why he should have entertained, of late, such
an excessive dislike for Wallencamp and its inhabitants. The natural
beauty of Wallencamp had impressed me daily more and more, and the people
were harmless, to say the least. I thought he should have enjoyed them;
he had a humorous vein; he was not too snobbish; and he seemed of a
nature to wish to make himself generally agreeable to people; but for
these special objects of my care he had expressed only derision and
contempt, with often a touch of positive malice; and had not been able to
abstain from giving me a hard cut or two on my mission, barely avoiding
it in his letter, and rejoicing with what seemed to me an unwarrantable
warmth in the hope that I should soon quit forever the abominable place.

Then, in my miserable short-sightedness, my thoughts wandered indirectly
to Rebecca. I wondered if she had taken to heart anything in the
acquaintance she was said to have had with Mr. Rollin, before I came to
Wallencamp, which had caused the change in her. I did not believe she
had. The girl was too artless and simple to have concealed so completely
the resentment she would naturally have cherished--too childish to have
borne it so silently. As far as the fisherman was implicated in the
affair, even if he had trifled a little for his own amusement with the
vague impulses, possibly the affections, of this unsophisticated girl,
the act was by no means unprecedented among people of wealth and
respectability. It was a diversion in which Arthur Grey and Stephen
Montgomery would not have indulged, perhaps, "but this," I mused, "is a
sadly commonplace sort of world, viewed in the broad daylight of wisdom
and experience (and with such penetrating rays I felt my own optics to be
only too wearily oppressed); we must give up our high ideals, take people
as we find then, and submit gracefully to the inevitable."

Still I was in as much of a quandary as ever as to what I should choose
to consider the inevitable in my own path. It never occurred to me in
this dilemma to seek advice from the elder members of my own family. They
knew nothing really of my situation in Wallencamp, and even if they had
been informed more truthfully in regard to it, I thought they could
hardly be expected to appreciate the peculiarly trying circumstances in
which I was placed just at