omething; but it suggested no particularly
profitable line of action. If she could have done something at the
moment, on the spot, she would have stepped upon a European steamer and
turned her back, with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying
failure, her visit to her American relations. It is not exactly apparent
why she should have termed this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she
had been treated with the highest distinction for which allowance had
been made in American institutions. Her irritation came, at bottom, from
the sense, which, always present, had suddenly grown acute, that the
social soil on this big, vague continent was somehow not adapted for
growing those plants whose fragrance she especially inclined to
inhale and by which she liked to see herself surrounded--a species of
vegetation for which she carried a collection of seedlings, as we
may say, in her pocket. She found her chief happiness in the sense of
exerting a certain power and making a certain impression; and now she
felt the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore,
to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock when he had counted upon
a clean firm beach. Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost
its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable.
"Surely je n'en suis pas la," she said to herself, "that I let it make
me uncomfortable that a Mr. Robert Acton should n't honor me with a
visit!" Yet she was vexed that he had not come; and she was vexed at her
vexation.

Her brother, at least, came in, stamping in the hall and shaking the wet
from his coat. In a moment he entered the room, with a glow in his cheek
and half-a-dozen rain-drops glistening on his mustache. "Ah, you have a
fire," he said.

"Les beaux jours sont passes," replied the Baroness.

"Never, never! They have only begun," Felix declared, planting himself
before the hearth. He turned his back to the fire, placed his hands
behind him, extended his legs and looked away through the window with an
expression of face which seemed to denote the perception of rose-color
even in the tints of a wet Sunday.

His sister, from her chair, looked up at him, watching him; and what she
saw in his face was not grateful to her present mood. She was puzzled
by many things, but her brother's disposition was a frequent source
of wonder to her. I say frequent and not constant, for there were long
periods during which she gave her attention