they were unmarried) he had been looking at
pictures under glass. He perceived at present what a nuisance the glass
had been--how it perverted and interfered, how it caught the reflection
of other objects and kept you walking from side to side. He had no need
to ask himself whether Charlotte and Gertrude, and Lizzie Acton, were
in the right light; they were always in the right light. He liked
everything about them: he was, for instance, not at all above liking the
fact that they had very slender feet and high insteps. He liked their
pretty noses; he liked their surprised eyes and their hesitating, not
at all positive way of speaking; he liked so much knowing that he was
perfectly at liberty to be alone for hours, anywhere, with either of
them; that preference for one to the other, as a companion of solitude,
remained a minor affair. Charlotte Wentworth's sweetly severe features
were as agreeable as Lizzie Acton's wonderfully expressive blue eyes;
and Gertrude's air of being always ready to walk about and listen was
as charming as anything else, especially as she walked very gracefully.
After a while Felix began to distinguish; but even then he would often
wish, suddenly, that they were not all so sad. Even Lizzie Acton,
in spite of her fine little chatter and laughter, appeared sad. Even
Clifford Wentworth, who had extreme youth in his favor, and kept a buggy
with enormous wheels and a little sorrel mare with the prettiest legs
in the world--even this fortunate lad was apt to have an averted,
uncomfortable glance, and to edge away from you at times, in the manner
of a person with a bad conscience. The only person in the circle with
no sense of oppression of any kind was, to Felix's perception, Robert
Acton.

It might perhaps have been feared that after the completion of those
graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame M;
auunster would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities
of ennui. But as yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a
restless soul, and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said,
into any situation that lay before her. Up to a certain point her
restlessness might be counted upon to entertain her. She was always
expecting something to happen, and, until it was disappointed,
expectancy itself was a delicate pleasure. What the Baroness expected
just now it would take some ingenuity to set forth; it is enough
that while she looked about her she foun