"A second marriage," thought Mr. Raleigh, "and before the orphan's crapes are"--Then, fearful lest she should read his thought, he added,--"And how do you speak such perfect English?"
"Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I have written home twice a week since I was a little child. Mamma, too, spoke as much English as French."
"I have not been in America for a long time," said Mr. Raleigh, after a few steps. "But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know."
"What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"--
"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide, possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure."
"It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one," said she, dreamily. "Mais non, je m'y perds. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New York avenues lined with them."
"No; the houses there are palaces."
"I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"
"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said Mr. Raleigh.
"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. Ainsi soit il!" she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.