stimated this trait in Lucian, as she did one or two other
traits; he himself would never have dreamed of being so brave as she
supposed him to be. He was brave enough, physically he had never known a
fear; but that it was indomitable courage which made him smile so
light-heartedly in the face of fortunes so modest--that it was a
splendid defiance--this was where the slow, silent, passionate-hearted
Rosalie was entirely mistaken. It was temperament more than anything
else. But it was natural that she should fall into this error, brought
up as she had been among people who were immovably set in all their
ideas, proud of their mediocrity (they called it conservatism), who had
inherited their wealth through several generations, and who, while
close and careful in all their ways, enemies to everything in the least
like extravagance, were yet fully of the opinion that respectability as
well as happiness depended upon an unassailable foundation of fixed
income; having always lived in this atmosphere, and possessing small
talent for remarking anything outside of her own narrow little world, it
was impossible for Rosalie Bogardus to grasp at once a plan of life
which differed so widely from the only one she knew. She could not
conceive the idea at first of a person like Lucian living on with
contented enjoyment, day after day, without any fortune, any hope of
inheriting one, or any effort towards obtaining one. She knew people, of
course, who had no fortunes; but if young, as he was, they were all
engaged in either planning for them, waiting for them, or working for
them, with more or less eagerness and energy. Lucian appeared to be
neither waiting nor working, and the only plan he had with regard to
such matters was to go back to the office of the company that employed
him (because he must), when his summer should be ended; so long as he
was earning his mere living from year to year (not a difficult task, as
he had no very extravagant tastes, and only himself to provide for), he
seemed to think that he was doing sufficiently well as regarded material
things--always to him subordinate: a state of mind which Rosalie's
relatives, if they had known it, would have deemed either a negligence
that was almost criminal, or downright idiocy, one or the other. Rosalie
herself, not conceiving such an unambitious creed in a nature so rich,
idealized what she did not understand. She dressed up this lack of
energetic acquisitiveness, and made