ugh. We are dying
to get him married--and a California cousin--it would be too romantic.
And you would hold your own anywhere!"

But Miss Otis expanded a fine nostril. "I have no desire to marry. I
feel as if I had had enough of men to last until I am forty--what with
those I have buried, and others I have known at home and in Europe--to
say nothing of the executors of my uncle's will, who did not approve of
my coming abroad alone and delayed the settlement of the estate as long
as possible. And now I have had too much liberty! Besides, I have seen
'Jack's' picture--two years ago, in a magazine. I will confess I had
some romantic notions about him: imagined him very dashing, bold,
handsome; insolent, if you like--the traditional young aristocrat,
glorified by genius. He looks like Uncle Hiram."

"Is that who Jack looks like? We never could make out. No, Jack is not
much to look at, except when he wakes up--I have seen him quite
transfigured on the platform. But he is as insolent as you could wish,
and has a superb confidence in himself that his enemies call by the most
offensive names. But he is a dear, in spite of all, and I quite adore
him."

"Perhaps; but life, myself, so many mysteries and problems, upon which
I have barely turned a dark lantern as yet, interest me far more than
any man could, unless he were superlative. I have had my disillusions."

She lit another cigarette, and for a few moments looked silently out of
the window at the darkening woods beyond the lawn. Flora Thangue
regarded her with a swelling interest. It was a type of which she had no
knowledge, evidently not a common type even in the hypothetical land of
the free; she had visited New York and Newport and known many Americans.
True, she had never met the provincial type before, but she doubted if
Rosewater had produced a crop of Isabel Otises. What was at the source
of that cold-blooded frankness, so different from the English fashion of
alternately speaking out and knowing nothing? Was she merely an
egoist--it ran in the family--or did it conceal much that she had no
intention of revealing? Her very beauty was of a type rarely seen in the
America of to-day, prevalent as it may have been a hundred years ago:
she looked like a feminine edition of the first group of American
statesmen--although black Spanish hair was pulled carelessly over the
high forehead, a heavy coil encircling the head in a long upward sweep,
and the half-dreaming, half-