, in particular, she was strange--a combination in
itself of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the
strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as
she was that it was much greater than any one else--any one but the
sole Susan Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston
was not in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing
Boston, and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was
delusive and vain. She was seeing her, and she had quite the deepest
moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision.
She couldn't explain it--no one would understand. They would say clever
Boston things--Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington, Vermont, which she
boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far
south"--but they would only darken counsel.

There could be no better proof, than this quick intellectual split, of
the impression made on our friend, who shone, herself, she was well
aware, with but the reflected light of the admirable city. She too had
had her discipline, but it had not made her striking; it had been
prosaically usual, though doubtless a decent dose; and had only made
her usual to match it--usual, that is, as Boston went. She had lost
first her husband, and then her mother, with whom, on her husband's
death, she had lived again; so that now, childless, she was but more
sharply single than before. But she sat rather coldly light, having, as
she called it, enough to live on--so far, that is, as she lived by
bread alone: how little indeed she was regularly content with that diet
appeared from the name she had made--Susan Shepherd Stringham--as a
contributor to the best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she
fondly believed she had her "note," the art of showing New England
without showing it wholly in the kitchen. She had not herself been
brought up in the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to speak
for them had thus become with her a literary mission. To _be_ in truth
literary had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her
bright little nippers perpetually in position. There were masters,
models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom she finely accounted so and
in whose light she ingeniously laboured; there were others whom,
however chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for she was full of
discrimination; but all categories failed her--they ceased at least to
signify--as