; she had pleased her fancy, if not her heart, with the
poetry of it; but at last she felt exiled and strange in his presence.
She had no right to a different result, even through any deep feeling in
the matter; but while she owned, with her half-sad, half-comical
consciousness, that she had been tacitly claiming and expecting too
much, she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal compassion,
as if it wore some other girl whose pretty dream had been broken. Its
ruin involved the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that there
had been gradually rising in her mind an image of Boston, different
alike from the holy place of her childhood, the sacred city of the
antislavery heroes and martyrs, and from the jesting, easy, sympathetic
Boston of Mr. and Mrs. March. This new Boston with which Mr. Arbuton
inspired her was a Boston of mysterious prejudices and lofty
reservations; a Boston of high and difficult tastes, that found its
social ideal in the Old World, and that shrank from contact with the
reality of this; a Boston as alien as Europe to her simple experiences,
and that seemed to be proud only of the things that were unlike other
American things; a Boston that would rather perish by fire and sword
than be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, and reluctant
Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly
self-satisfied in so far as it was not in the least the Boston of her
fond preconceptions. It was, doubtless, no more the real Boston we know
and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it
need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It made her suspicious of
Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards her, and observant of little things that
might very well have otherwise escaped her. The bantering humor, the
light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him
deserted her, and only returned fitfully when some accident called her
out of herself, and made her forget the differences that she now too
plainly saw in their ways of thinking and feeling. It was a greater and
greater effort to place herself in sympathy with him; she relaxed into a
languid self-contempt, as if she had been playing a part, when she
succeeded. "Sometimes, Fanny," she said, now, after a long pause,
speaking in behalf of that other girl she had been thinking of, "it
seems to me as if Mr. Arbuton were all gloves and slim umbrella,--the
mere husk of well dressed culture and good manner