sensitive plant,
a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing....

At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much
changed. They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality of
judgment. They read Dickens, and Thackeray with avidity; went now and
then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at Dodworth's;
had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame at their lack
of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early
married life, they would have considered shocking.... They would greatly
have liked to see Daniel shine in society. Of his erudition they were
proud even to worship. The young man never had any business, and his
father never seemed to think of giving him any, knowing, as Billy would
say, that he had stamps enough to "see him through." If Daniel liked,
his father would have endowed a professorship in some college and given
him the chair; but that would have taken him away from his own room and
the family physician.

Daniel knew how much his parents wished him to make a figure in the
world, and only blamed himself for his failure, magnanimously forgetting
that they had crushed out the faculties which enable a man to mint the
small change of every-day society, in the exclusive cultivation of such
as fit him for smelting its ponderous ingots. With that merciful
blindness which alone prevents all our lives from becoming a horror of
nerveless self-reproach, his parents were equally unaware of their share
in the harm done him, when they ascribed to a delicate organization the
fact that, at an age when love runs riot in all healthy blood, he could
not see a Balmoral without his cheeks rivalling the most vivid stripe in
it. They flattered themselves that he would outgrow his bashfulness; but
Daniel had no such hope, and frequently confided in me that he thought
he should never marry at all.

About two hours after Billy's disappearance under his mother's convoy,
the defender of the oppressed returned to my room bearing the dog under
his arm. His cheeks shone with washing like a pair of waxy spitzenbergs,
and other indignities had been offered him to the extent of the brush
and comb. He also had a whole jacket on....

Billy and I also obtained permission to go out together and be gone the
entire afternoon. We put Crab on a comfortable bed of rags in an old
shoe-box, and then strolled hand-in-hand across that most delightful of
New York breathin