s own passionate liking for Heine and Bjoernson. She
had in return called his attention to the works of American authors
who had hitherto been little more than names to him, and they had thus
managed to be of mutual benefit to each other, and to spend many a
pleasant hour during the long winter afternoons in each other's company.
But Edith had a very keen sense of humor, and could hardly restrain her
secret amusement when she heard him reading Longfellow's "Psalm of Life"
and Poe's "Raven" (which had been familiar to her from her babyhood),
often with false accent, but always with intense enthusiasm. The
reflection that he had had no part of his life in common with her,--that
he did not love the things which she loved,--could not share her
prejudices (and women have a feeling akin to contempt for a man who does
not respond to their prejudices)--removed him at times almost beyond
the reach of her sympathy. It was interesting enough as long as the
experience was novel, to be thus unconsciously exploring another
person's mind and finding so many strange objects there; but after a
while the thing began to assume an uncomfortably serious aspect, and
then there seemed to be something almost terrible about it. At such
times a call from a gentleman of her own nation, even though he were
one of the placidly stupid type, would be a positive relief; she could
abandon herself to the secure sense of being at home; she need fear
no surprises, and in the smooth shallows of their talk there were no
unsuspected depths to excite and to baffle her ingenuity. And, again,
reverting in her thought to Halfdan, his conversational brilliancy would
almost repel her, as something odious and un-American, the cheap result
of outlandish birth and unrepublican education. Not that she had ever
valued republicanism very highly; she was one of those who associated
politics with noisy vulgarity in speech and dress, and therefore thanked
fortune that women were permitted to keep aloof from it. But in the
presence of this alien she found herself growing patriotic; that
much-discussed abstraction, which we call our country (and which is
nothing but the aggregate of all the slow and invisible influences which
go toward making up our own being), became by degrees a very palpable
and intelligible fact to her.

Frequently while her American self was thus loudly asserting itself,
Edith inflicted many a cruel wound upon her foreign adorer. Once,--it
was the Fourt