e was to accept with a world of stifled
protestations. One condition alone she was to make--that he should have
"race" in a state as documented as it was possible to have it. On this
she would stake her happiness; and it was so to happen that several
accidents conspired to give convincing colour to this artless
philosophy.

Inclined to long pauses and slow approaches herself, Euphemia was
a great sitter at the feet of breathless volubility, and there were
moments when she fairly hung upon the lips of Mademoiselle Marie de
Mauves. Her intimacy with this chosen schoolmate was founded on the
perception--all her own--that their differences were just the right
ones. Mademoiselle de Mauves was very positive, very shrewd,
very ironical, very French--everything that Euphemia felt herself
unpardonable for not being. During her Sundays en ville she had examined
the world and judged it, and she imparted her impressions to our
attentive heroine with an agreeable mixture of enthusiasm and
scepticism. She was moreover a handsome and well-grown person, on whom
Euphemia's ribbons and trinkets had a trick of looking better than on
their slender proprietress. She had finally the supreme merit of being
a rigorous example of the virtue of exalted birth, having, as she did,
ancestors honourably mentioned by Joinville and Commines, and a stately
grandmother with a hooked nose who came up with her after the holidays
from a veritable castel in Auvergne. It seemed to our own young woman
that these attributes made her friend more at home in the world than if
she had been the daughter of even the most prosperous grocer. A certain
aristocratic impudence Mademoiselle de Mauves abundantly possessed,
and her raids among her friend's finery were quite in the spirit of her
baronial ancestors in the twelfth century--a spirit regarded by
Euphemia but as a large way of understanding friendship, a freedom from
conformities without style, and one that would sooner or later express
itself in acts of surprising magnanimity. There doubtless prevailed
in the breast of Mademoiselle de Mauves herself a dimmer vision of the
large securities that Euphemia envied her. She was to become later in
life so accomplished a schemer that her sense of having further heights
to scale might well have waked up early. The especially fine appearance
made by our heroine's ribbons and trinkets as her friend wore them
ministered to pleasure on both sides, and the spell was not of a