se of especially
dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things."
This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks, doubtless, to
rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together
with too little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was
expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence. When
Milly smiled it was a public event--when she didn't it was a chapter of
history. They had stopped, on the Bruenig, for luncheon, and there had
come up for them under the charm of the place the question of a longer
stay.

Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small
sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but
which, on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed
itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of
her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a
term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form
of silver medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked
with alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were
taken highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed
her familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the
best. These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the
pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like
Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of
the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and with
extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had
embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her
presence. She had given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and
Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards a standard of
comparison for all cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in
especial--Susan was the younger--with a character that, as Mrs.
Stringham had often had occasion, through life, to say to herself, made
all the difference. It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over
and over again and in the most remote connections, that, thanks to her
parent's lonely, thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
There were plenty of women who were all sorts of things that she
wasn't, but who, on the oth