d see
for herself.

They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche--a vehicle as to which
the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that was asked
for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat. (At Silberstadt
Madame Munster had had liveries of yellow and crimson.) They drove
into the country, and the Baroness, leaning far back and swaying her
lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the
way-side objects. After a while she pronounced them "affreux."
Her brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the
foreground was inferior to the plans recules: and the Baroness rejoined
that the landscape seemed to be all foreground. Felix had fixed with his
new friends the hour at which he should bring his sister; it was four
o'clock in the afternoon. The large, clean-faced house wore, to his
eyes, as the barouche drove up to it, a very friendly aspect; the high,
slender elms made lengthening shadows in front of it. The Baroness
descended; her American kinsfolk were stationed in the portico. Felix
waved his hat to them, and a tall, lean gentleman, with a high forehead
and a clean shaven face, came forward toward the garden gate. Charlotte
Wentworth walked at his side. Gertrude came behind, more slowly. Both of
these young ladies wore rustling silk dresses. Felix ushered his sister
into the gate. "Be very gracious," he said to her. But he saw the
admonition was superfluous. Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as
only Eugenia could be. Felix knew no keener pleasure than to be able to
admire his sister unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent,
it was not inveterate. When she desired to please she was to him, as
to every one else, the most charming woman in the world. Then he
forgot that she was ever anything else; that she was sometimes hard and
perverse; that he was occasionally afraid of her. Now, as she took
his arm to pass into the garden, he felt that she desired, that she
proposed, to please, and this situation made him very happy. Eugenia
would please.

The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave. But
it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning. Mr. Wentworth's manner
was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility, of
the solemnity of the occasion, of its being difficult to show sufficient
deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy. Felix
had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor;