uite without contradiction. People spoke of her, therefore, as very
appreciative, and, for a woman, broad-minded. What, in truth, can be
more broad-minded in one of the sex most given to partisanship than to
be able to listen with unprejudiced attention to the admirers of the
Rev. Mr. A., the distinguished High-Church clergyman, and then the very
next day to the friends of the Rev. Mr. B., equally eminent, but Low; to
the devotees of the C. family, who trace their descent directly from old
English barons--passing over, of course, that unimportant ancestor who
happened to have been the one to cross to the New World, and who,
immediately after his arrival, engaged in blacksmithing, and became in
time the best blacksmith the struggling little colony possessed--to
listen, I say, to the partisans of this ancient race, and then to
hearken the next afternoon with equal equanimity to warm praise of the
D.'s, who, having made their great fortune so vigorously in the present
generation, are engaged in spending it with a vigor equally
commendable--what, indeed, could be broader than this? It never occurred
to these talkers that A. and B., the C.'s and the D.'s, alike, were all
non-existent bodies, nebulae, to Mrs. Peter Rutherford so long as she was
not personally acquainted with them, so long as their names were not
upon her visiting list.

But when once this had been discovered, as Evert Winthrop had discovered
it, it made everything clear; it was perfectly easy to understand her,
easy to see how simple the opinions appeared to the lady herself, since
they had to do merely with a series of facts. If Mr. X. had been polite
to her, if he had been attentive, deferential, he was without doubt (if
at all presentable) a most delightful and praiseworthy person in every
way. If Mr. X. had been civil to a certain extent, yet on the whole
rather indifferent, he was a little dull, she thought; a good sort of a
man perhaps, but not interesting; tiresome. If Mr. X. had simply left
her alone, without either civility or incivility, she was apt to have
mysterious intuitions about him, intuitions which she mentioned,
confidentially of course, to her friends; little things which she had
noticed--indications. Of bad temper? Or was it bad habits? It was
something bad, at any rate; she was very ingenious in reading the signs.
But if Mr. X. had been guilty of actual rudeness (a quality which she
judged strictly by the standard of her own hidden but ri