Mr. Arbuton brought his fancy to bear upon Eriecreek, and wholly failed
to conceive of it. He did not like the notion of its being thrust within
the range of his knowledge; and he resented its being the home of Miss
Ellison, whom he was beginning to accept as a not quite comprehensible
yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a disposition to cast
her off as something incredible. He asked no further about Eriecreek,
and presently she rose and went to join her relatives, and he went to
smoke his cigar, and to ponder upon the problem presented to him in this
young girl from whose locality and conjecturable experiences he was at
loss how to infer her as he found her here.

She had a certain self-reliance mingling with an innocent trust of
others which Mrs. Isabel March had described to her husband as a charm
potent to make everybody sympathetic and good-natured, but which it
would not be easy to account for to Mr. Arbuton. In part it was a
natural gift, and partly it came from mere ignorance of the world; it
was the unsnubbed fearlessness of a heart which did not suspect a sense
of social difference in others, or imagine itself misprized for anything
but a fault. For such a false conception of her relations to polite
society, Kitty's Uncle Jack was chiefly to blame. In the fierce
democracy of his revolt from his Virginian traditions he had taught his
family that a belief in any save intellectual and moral distinctions was
a mean and cruel superstition; he had contrived to fix this idea so
deeply in the education of his children, that it gave a coloring to
their lives, and Kitty, when her turn came, had the effect of it in the
character of those about her. In fact she accepted his extreme theories
of equality to a degree that delighted her uncle, who, having held them
many years, was growing perhaps a little languid in their tenure and was
glad to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. Socially as well as
politically Eriecreek was almost a perfect democracy, and there was
little in Kitty's circumstances to contradict the doctor's teachings.
The brief visits which she had made to Buffalo and Erie, and, since the
colonel's marriage, to Milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her; she
had never suffered slight save from the ignorant and uncouth; she
innocently expected that in people of culture she should always find
community of feeling and ideas; and she had met Mr. Arbuton all the more
trustfully because as a