ribution of her wardrobe. There were India shawls suspended,
curtain-wise, in the parlor door, and curious fabrics, corresponding to
Gertrude's metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak, tumbled about in the
sitting-places. There were pink silk blinds in the windows, by which the
room was strangely bedimmed; and along the chimney-piece was disposed a
remarkable band of velvet, covered with coarse, dirty-looking lace. "I
have been making myself a little comfortable," said the Baroness, much
to the confusion of Charlotte, who had been on the point of proposing to
come and help her put her superfluous draperies away. But what Charlotte
mistook for an almost culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very
presently perceived to be the most ingenious, the most interesting, the
most romantic intention. "What is life, indeed, without curtains?" she
secretly asked herself; and she appeared to herself to have been leading
hitherto an existence singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.

Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about
anything--least of all about the conditions of enjoyment. His faculty of
enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of
it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow. His
sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were
in themselves a delight to him. As they had come to him with a great
deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable than appeared.
Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not a restless,
apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of fate,
but a temper so unsuspicious as to put Adversity off her guard, dodging
and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted
flower. Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his
faculties--his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his
senses--had a hand in the game. It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had
been very well treated; there was something absolutely touching in that
combination of paternal liberality and social considerateness which
marked Mr. Wentworth's deportment. It was most uncommonly kind of him,
for instance, to have given them a house. Felix was positively amused
at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the
apple-trees--the chalet, as Madame Munster always called it--was much
more sensibly his own than any domiciliary quatrieme, looking upon a
court, with the rent