filial, just as an English
husband who in his military years had "run" everything in his regiment
could make economy blossom like the rose. Colonel Bob had, a few years
after his marriage, left the army, which had clearly, by that time, done
its laudable all for the enrichment of his personal experience, and
he could thus give his whole time to the gardening in question. There
reigned among the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost
too venerable for historical criticism, that the marriage itself,
the happiest of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age,
a primitive period when such things--such things as American girls
accepted as "good enough"--had not begun to be;--so that the pleasant
pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original,
honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a kind of
hymeneal Northwest Passage. Mrs. Assingham knew better, knew there had
been no historic hour, from that of Pocahontas down, when some young
Englishman hadn't precipitately believed and some American girl
hadn't, with a few more gradations, availed herself to the full of
her incapacity to doubt; but she accepted resignedly the laurel of the
founder, since she was in fact pretty well the doyenne, above ground,
of her transplanted tribe, and since, above all, she HAD invented
combinations, though she had not invented Bob's own. It was he who had
done that, absolutely puzzled it out, by himself, from his first odd
glimmer-resting upon it moreover, through the years to come, as proof
enough, in him, by itself, of the higher cleverness. If she kept her own
cleverness up it was largely that he should have full credit. There were
moments in truth when she privately felt how little--striking out as he
had done--he could have afforded that she should show the common limits.
But Mrs. Assingham's cleverness was in truth tested when her present
visitor at last said to her: "I don't think, you know, that you're
treating me quite right. You've something on your mind that you don't
tell me."

It was positive too that her smile, in reply, was a trifle dim. "Am I
obliged to tell you everything I have on my mind?"

"It isn't a question of everything, but it's a question of anything that
may particularly concern me. Then you shouldn't keep it back. You know
with what care I desire to proceed, taking everything into account and
making no mistake that may possibly injure HER."

Mrs. Assingham, at