fell in love with so many years ago.

When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still
lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of
merriment:

"It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try it."

And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a
passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her
husband's--"Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you are!"

A certain reputation for "wildness," a savour of innocent Bohemianism,
has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy
from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood,
they were fellow art-students together in Paris. Belonging both to
aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often
wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when
such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an
adventure indeed. But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of
feminine revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced
women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer. As a reminiscence
of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke
cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked
either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco--even
in the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it, of course, for
the fun of seeming "naughty"; which recalls to my mind her shocking
behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim
cousins in New York. It was a household of an excessively brown-stone