a fashionable hotel, and, with no other
credentials than his handsome person, good manners, and bold assertions
that he was related to certain great people in England, had been accepted
in society with that beautiful faith and charity that believeth all things
an Englishman of supposed position may choose to say of himself, in spite
of much disastrous experience of foreign adventurers both painful and
ludicrous. Attracted by Bijou, he promptly satisfied himself of the
stability and reality of her father's fortune, and began to lay siege to
her hand: about her heart he gave himself small concern. Now, Bijou was a
Western belle, and was in the habit of receiving any amount of attention.
At seventeen a famous racer and a steam-boat had already been named for
her. The local newspapers chronicled her toilets and triumphs. Her little
sitting-room was a sentimental hall of Eblis, full of shapes with hearts
that were one burning coal, bright with the sacred flame. She had a large
album which she called her "him-book," because it contained nothing but
the photographs of her admirers. She had hats, and bats, and caps, and
whips, and cravats, and oars, and canes disposed about it tastefully,
souvenirs of various persons, times, and places, and talked of the
original owners in a way that made Ethel's blue eyes open their widest
when she came to be admitted there, that decorous young person not being
used, as she frankly said, to hearing "a person of the opposite sex"
called "a perfectly lovely fellow," and his nose pronounced "a dream,"
though not in the sense of its being broken or disjointed.

"Why, you wouldn't have me call _you_ a lovely fellow, would you?" said
Bijou laughingly, as she tripped about doing the honors of her den,
--showing locks of hair (of which she had almost enough to stuff a
sofa-cushion), dried bouquets of vast dimensions, little gifts she had
received, verses and valentines that she thought "perfectly splendid" or
"too utterly killing for anything," and bundle after bundle of letters,
--the adorers' letters, all of them, written from all parts of the country,
in every style. She read Ethel choice passages from them with great glee,
and gave spirited sketches of her correspondents; how she had met them at
Saratoga, Mt. Desert, "and pretty much every place;" how she had danced,
flirted, walked, driven, sailed, "crabbed," read, sung, talked with them,
apparently without either fear or reproach; and of their app