s read a great deal, and you've
made her think herself intellectual--but the very simple-heartedness of
the way she would show out her reading would make such a young man see
that she wasn't like the girls he was used to. They would hide their
intellectuality, if they had any. It's no use your trying to fight it
Mr. Kenton. We are country people, and he knows it."

"Tuskingum isn't country!" the judge declared.

"It isn't city. And we don't know anything about the world, any of us.
Oh, I suppose we can read and write! But we don't know the a, b, c of
the things he, knows. He, belongs to a kind of society--of people--in
New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never imagined
before. They made me feel very belated and benighted--as if I hadn't,
read or thought anything. They didn't mean to; but I couldn't help it,
and they couldn't."

"You--you've been frightened out of your propriety by what you've seen
in New York," said her husband.

"I've been frightened, certainly. And I wish you had been, too. I wish
you wouldn't be so conceited about Ellen. It scares me to see you so.
Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone! You must see that. And she
doesn't dress like the girls he's used to. I know we've got her things
in New York; but she doesn't wear them like a New-Yorker. I hope she
isn't going in for MORE unhappiness!"

At the thought of this the judge's crest fell. "Do you believe she's
getting interested in him?" he asked, humbly.

"No, no; I don't say that. But promise me you won't encourage her in it.
And don't, for pity's sake, brag about her to him."

"No, I won't," said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.

The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview
with his wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung
convalescently along the promenade on their steamer-chairs. These, so
far as they were women, were of such sick plainness that when he came
to Ellen his heart throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother's
aspersion of her health and beauty. She looked not only very well, and
very pretty, but in a gay red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her
father's uncritical eyes, very stylish. The glow left his heart at eight
of the empty seat beside her.

"Where is Lottie?" he asked, though it was not Lottie's whereabouts that
interested him.

"Oh, she's walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere," said Ellen.

"Then she's made up her mind to tolerate him