“How can you say that, Kate? I’m sure it was because you scarcely answered him at all, and read your book—which was not very polite.”
“I was afraid to venture upon anything more than monosyllables with him,” said Kate, “or I should have been ruder still. I should have had to tell him that I did not like Americans who made the accident of their having been to Europe an excuse for sneering at those who haven’t been there, and that would have been highly impolite, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think he sneered,” replied Mrs. Minster. “I thought he tried to be as affable and interesting as he knew how. Pray what did he say that was sneering?”
“Oh, dear me, I don’t in the least remember what he said. It was his tone, I think, more than any special remark. He had an air of condoling with me because he had seen so many things that I have only read about; and he patronized the car, and the heating-apparatus, and the conductor, and the poor little black porter, and all of us.”
“He was a pretty boy. Does he hold his own, now he’s grown up?” asked Miss Tabitha. “He used to favor the Boyce side a good deal.”
“I should say he favored the Boyce side to the exclusion of everybody else’s side,” said Kate, with a little smile at her own conceit, “particularly his own individual section of it. He is rather tall, with light hair, light eyes, light mustache, light talk, light everything; and he looks precisely like all the other young men you see in New York nowadays, with their coats buttoned in just such a way, and their gloves of just such a shade, and a scarf of just such a shape with the same kind of pin in it, and their hats laid sidewise in the rack so that you can observe that they have a London maker’s brand in-side. There! you have his portrait to a t. Do you recognize it?”
“What will poor countrified Thessaly ever do with such a metropolitan model as this?” asked Ethel. “We shall all be afraid to go out in the street, for fear he should discover us to be out of the fashion.”
“Oh, he is not going to stay here,” said Mrs. Minster. “He told us that he had decided to enter some law firm in New York. It seems a number of very flattering openings have been offered him.”
“I happen to know,” put in Miss Tabitha, “that he is going to stay here. What is more, he has as good as struck up a partnership with Reuben Tracy. I had it this morning from a lady whose brother-in-law is extremely intimate with the General.”
“That is very curious,” mused Mrs. Minster. “He certainly talked yesterday of settling in New York, and mentioned the offers he had had, and his doubt as to which to accept.”