t qualities, as Albert inventoried them, were good sense, good
taste, and absolute truthfulness and simplicity of character. These were
the qualities that he saw in her after a brief acquaintance. They were
not striking, and yet they were qualities that commanded respect. But he
looked in vain for those high ideals of a vocation and a goal that so
filled his own soul. If she read of Mary Lyon, she had no aspiration to
imitate her. Her whole mind seemed full of the ordinary cares of life.
Albert could not abide that anybody should expend even such abilities as
Isa possessed on affairs of raiment and domestic economy. The very tokens
of good taste and refined feeling in her dress were to him evidences of
over-careful vanity.

But when his mother and Katy had gone out on the morning after he had
overheard Smith Westcott expound his views on the matter of marriage,
Charlton sought Isa Marlay. She sat sewing in the parlor, as it was
called--the common sitting-room of the house--by the west window. The
whole arrangement of the room was hers; and though Albert was neither an
artist nor a critic in matters of taste, he was, as I have already
indicated, a man of fine susceptibility. He rejoiced in this
susceptibility when it enabled him to appreciate nature. He repressed it
when he found himself vibrating in sympathy with those arts that had, as
he thought, relations with human weakness and vanity; as, for instance,
the arts of music and dress. But, resist as one may, a man can not fight
against his susceptibilities. And those who can feel the effect of any
art are very many more than those who can practice it or criticise it. It
does not matter that my Bohemian friend's musical abilities are slender.
No man in the great Boston Jubilee got more out of Johann Strauss, in
his "Kunstleben," that inimitable expression of inspired vagabondage,
than he did. And so, though Albert Charlton could not have told you what
colors would "go together," as the ladies say, he could, none the less,
always feel the discord of his mother's dress, as now he felt the beauty
of the room and appreciated the genius of Isa, that had made so much out
of resources so slender. For there were only a few touch-me-nots in the
two vases on the mantel-piece; there were wild-flowers and
prairie-grasses over the picture-frames; there were asparagus-stalks in
the fireplace; there was--well, there was a _tout-ensemble_ of coolness
and delightfulness, of freshness and