as inferior in point of view to none, and typical of the
best national characteristics. She had probably never put into words the
reasons of her confidence, but her daily consciousness was permeated
with them. To be an American meant to be more keenly alive to the
responsibility of life than any other citizen of civilization, and to be
an American woman meant to be something finer, cleverer, stronger, and
purer than any other daughter of Eve. Under the agreeable but sobering
influence of this faith she had grown to womanhood, and the heroic deeds
of the civil war had served to intensify a belief, the truth of which
she had never heard questioned. Her mission in life had promptly been
recognized by her as the development of her soul along individual lines,
but until the necessity for a choice had arisen she had been content to
contemplate a little longer. Now the world was before her, for she was
twenty-three and singularly free from ties. Her mother had died when she
was a child. Her father, the physician of the surrounding country, a man
of engaging energy with an empirical education and a speculative habit
of mind, had been the companion of her girlhood. During the last few
years since his return from the war an invalid from a wound, her care
for him had left her time for little else.

No more was Babcock in haste to reach home; and after the preliminary
dash from the door into the glorious night he suffered the farm-horse to
pursue its favorite gait, a deliberate jog. He knew the creature to be
docile, and that he could bestow his attention on his companion without
peril to her. His own pulses were bounding. He was conscious of having
made the whirligig of time pass merrily for the company by his spirits
and jolly quips, and that in her presence, and he was groping for an
appropriate introduction to the avowal he had determined to make. He
would never have a better opportunity than this, and it had been his
preconceived intention to take advantage of it if all went well. All had
gone well and he was going to try. She had been kind coming over; and
had seemed to listen with interest as he told her about himself: and
somehow he had felt less distant from her. He was not sure what she
would say, for he realized that she was above him. That was one reason
why he admired her so. She symbolized for him refinement, poetry, art,
the things of the spirit--things from which in the same whirligig of
time he had hitherto been cu