d
him. The men in this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very
obliging. Her declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement
had been by no means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was
wholly untrue. It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she
said was wholly true. She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a
return to nature; it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond
of new milk. She said to herself, of course, that it would be a little
dull; but there can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact
that she thought she should not mind its being a little dull. It seemed
to her, when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out
over the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds,
the rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of
so peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual
pleasure. It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it
something good must come. Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith
in her mistress's wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal perplexed
and depressed. She was always ready to take her cue when she understood
it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion comprehension
failed. What, indeed, was the Baroness doing dans cette galere? what
fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant waters? The game
was evidently a deep one. Augustine could trust her; but the sense of
walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy of this spare,
sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in common with
Gertrude Wentworth's conception of a soubrette, by the most ironical
scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the peace and
plenty of the Wentworths. Fortunately, Augustine could quench skepticism
in action. She quite agreed with her mistress--or rather she quite
out-stripped her mistress--in thinking that the little white house
was pitifully bare. "Il faudra," said Augustine, "lui faire un peu de
toilette." And she began to hang up portieres in the doorways; to place
wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected situations;
to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and the backs of
chairs. The Baroness had brought with her to the New World a copious
provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss Wentworths, when
they came over to see her, were somewhat bewildered by the obtrusive
dist