r period than the time when Clementina's visit to Mrs. Lander
actually began, and that all which could be done had been done to efface
her real character by indulgence and luxury.

His curiosity concerning her childhood, her home, her father and mother,
her brothers and sisters, and his misunderstanding of everything she
told him, amused her. But she liked him, and she tried to give him some
notion of the things he wished so much to know. It always ended in a
dissatisfaction, more or less vehement, with the outcome of American
conditions as he conceived them.

"But you," he urged one day, "you who are a daughter of the fields and
woods, why should you forsake that pure life, and come to waste yourself
here?"

"Why, don't you think it's very nice in Florence?" she asked, with eyes
of innocent interest.

"Nice! Nice! Do we live for what is nice? Is it enough that you have
what you Americans call a nice time?"

Clementina reflected. "I wasn't doing much of anything at home, and
I thought I might as well come with Mrs. Lander, if she wanted me so
much." She thought in a certain way, that he was meddling with what was
not his affair, but she believed that he was sincere in his zeal for
the ideal life he wished her to lead, and there were some things she had
heard about him that made her pity and respect him; his self-exile and
his renunciation of home and country for his principles, whatever they
were; she did not understand exactly. She would not have liked never
being able to go back to Middlemount, or to be cut off from all her
friends as this poor young Nihilist was, and she said, now, "I didn't
expect that it was going to be anything but a visit, and I always
supposed we should go back in the spring; but now Mrs. Lander is
beginning to think she won't be well enough till fall."

"And why need you stay with her?"

"Because she's not very well," answered Clementina, and she smiled, a
little triumphantly as well as tolerantly.

"She could hire nurses and doctors, all she wants with her money."

"I don't believe it would be the same thing, exactly, and what should I
do if I went back?"

"Do? Teach! Uplift the lives about you."

"But you say it is better for people to live simply, and not read and
think so much."

"Then labor in the fields with them."

Clementina laughed outright. "I guess if anyone saw me wo'king in the
fields they would think I was a disgrace to the neighbahood."

Belsky gave her a stupif