them--as she had wished.

After all her democratic education, social consideration was the one
ambition that had formed in pretty Mercedes' mind. Her desire for this
was as real in the form it took with men as in the form it took with
other women; as clear the outcome of the books and reading given her
as of the training given any upper servant in a London suburb,
patterned on a lady mistress. Mercedes had no affections; she was as
careless of religion as a Yankee boy; this desire alone she had of
self-esteem above her fellow-creatures, especially those of her own
sex and age. Her education had not gone to the point of giving her
higher enjoyment,--poetry, art, happiness of thought. Even her
piano-playing was but an adornment. She never played for her own
pleasure; and what was the use of practicing now?

This New World life has got reduced to about three motives, like the
three primary colors; one is rather surprised that so few can blend in
so many shades of people. Money-getting, love of self, love,--is not
that quite all? Yet poor Jamie and Mercedes, who was nearest to him,
did not happen in the same division. Hughson, perhaps, made even the
third. Yet a woman who holds herself too fine for her world will get
recognition, commonly, from it. To honest Hughson, lying unwontedly
awake and thinking of the evening's chances and mischances, now in a
hot fit, now in a cold fit, of something like to love, such a creature
as Mercedes, as she lightly hung upon his arm that evening, had never
yet appeared. She was an angel, a being apart, a fairy,--any crude
simile that occurs to honest plodding men of such young girls. John
took the _distrait_ look for dreamy thought; her irresponsiveness for
ethereal purity; her moodiness for superiority of soul. She imposed
herself on him now, as she had done before on Jamie, as deserving a
higher life than he could give her. This is what a man terms being in
love, and then would wish, _quand meme_, to drag his own life into
hers!

One day, some weeks after this, Mr. James Bowdoin, on coming down to
the little office on the wharf rather later than usual, went up the
stairs, more than ever choky with that spicy dust that was the
mummy-like odor of departed trade, and divined that the cause thereof
was in the counting-room itself, whence issued sounds of much bumping
and falling, as if a dozen children were playing leap-frog on the
floor. Jamie McMurtagh was seated on the stool in the oute