treet in real life, does it? The people all look as if they had
stepped out of stories, and might step back any moment; and these queer
little houses: they're the very places for things to happen in!"

Mr. Arbuton smiled forbearingly, as she thought, at this burst, but she
did not care, and she turned, at the bottom of the street, and lingered
a few moments for another look at the whole charming picture; and then
he praised it, and said that the artist was making a very good sketch.
"I wonder Quebec isn't infested by artists the whole summer long," he
added. "They go about hungrily picking up bits of the picturesque, along
our shores and country roads, when they might exchange their famine for
a feast by coming here."

"I suppose there's a pleasure in finding out the small graces and
beauties of the poverty-stricken subjects, that they wouldn't have in
better ones, isn't there?" asked Kitty. "At any rate, if I were to write
a story, I should want to take the slightest sort of plot, and lay the
scene in the dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their
possibilities. I'll tell you a book after my own heart:
'_Details_,'--just the history of a week in the life of some young
people who happen together in an old New England country-house; nothing
extraordinary, little, every-day things told so exquisitely, and all
fading naturally away without any particular result, only the full
meaning of everything brought out."

"And don't you think it's rather a sad ending for all to fade away
without any particular result?" asked the young man, stricken he hardly
knew how or where. "Besides, I always thought that the author of that
book found too much meaning in everything. He did for men, I'm sure; but
I believe women are different, and see much more than we do in a little
space."

"'Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly,'

nor a woman," mocked Kitty. "Have you read his other books?"

"Yes."

"Aren't they delightful?"

"They're very well; and I always wondered he could write them. He
doesn't look it."

"O, have you ever seen him?"

"He lives in Boston, you know."

"Yes, yes; but--" Kitty could not go on and say that she had not
supposed authors consorted with creatures of common clay; and Mr.
Arbuton, who was the constant guest of people who would have thought
most authors sufficiently honored in being received among them to meet
such men as he, was very far from gues