overdue. Felix had spent a good deal of his life
in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows
resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a
cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away and
the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He had
never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England fields;
and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses. He had
never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of
making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found
an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his
uncle's. The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung
a rosy light over this homely privilege. He appreciated highly the fare
that was set before him. There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance
about it which made him think that people must have lived so in
the mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass,
replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of kitchen
stoves. But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found a
family--sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might
call by their first names. He had never known anything more charming
than the attention they paid to what he said. It was like a large sheet
of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with
effective splashes of water-color. He had never had any cousins, and
he had never before found himself in contact so unrestricted with young
unmarried ladies. He was extremely fond of the society of ladies, and it
was new to him that it might be enjoyed in just this manner. At first he
hardly knew what to make of his state of mind. It seemed to him that
he was in love, indiscriminately, with three girls at once. He saw that
Lizzie Acton was more brilliantly pretty than Charlotte and Gertrude;
but this was scarcely a superiority. His pleasure came from something
they had in common--a part of which was, indeed, that physical delicacy
which seemed to make it proper that they should always dress in thin
materials and clear colors. But they were delicate in other ways, and
it was most agreeable to him to feel that these latter delicacies were
appreciable by contact, as it were. He had known, fortunately, many
virtuous gentlewomen, but it now appeared to him that in his relations
with them (especially when