town, as on many other occasions, included Robert
Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably
not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers
was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this
tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was
not Mr. Wentworth's way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden
irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an
element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required
a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its
principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the
light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual
exercise with which Felix Young's American cousins were almost wholly
unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in
any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was
a satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic
satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more
recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr.
Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of
reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of
enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth,
who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had
not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext
in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude,
however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions,
both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the objective,
order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this little
history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this abrupt
enlargement of Mr. Wentworth's sympathies and those of his daughters was
an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the doctrine, as it
may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of mistakes was one of
the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth family.

"I don't believe she wants to come and stay in this house," said
Gertrude; Madame Munster, from this time forward, receiving no other
designation than the personal pronoun. Charlotte and Gertrude acquired
considerable facility in addressing her, directly, as "Eugenia;" but in
speaking of her to each other they rarely called her anything but