complained to Miss Noel, saying, "Why will they ask me out? Why can't they
leave me alone? Really, I shall not let any one know that I am here, if
anything ever brings me back to America,--which is most unlikely."

"There is nothing to prevent you staying at home if you do not wish to go
out," replied Miss Noel. "But do you not like it? I enjoy going to the
Browns'. Mr. Brown is a man of cultivated mind and Christian courtesy; I
like him very much; and the people one meets there are generally of
superior station and refined education. Why should you object to meeting
them?"

"American society may be nice some day,--that is, if it ever grows up.
There doesn't seem to be anybody in it now over twenty," grumbled Mrs.
Sykes.

One result of the parties was that Mr. Ketchum, going over to Mr. Brown's
one morning, found all the young people assembled there practising steps,
the "two-and-a-half," the "polka-glide," and other cheerful evolutions.
After watching Mr. Ramsay's efforts to do as Bijou did, for a moment, he
called out to her to know what she was doing to a British subject under
his protection, and, being shown by Bijou (skirts held up a little, the
prettiest feet imaginable, daintily shod, and the gliding, swaying,
pirouetting, galopading, graceful beyond expression), cried out, "Teaching
him to dance, are you? I thought he was practising heading off a calf in a
lane." This so exactly expressed the awkward desperate plunges to the
right and left which Mr. Ramsay was executing at the moment, that Mr.
Heathcote had another of his acute attacks of appreciation, and became
almost a subject for sal volatile and burnt feathers, Mr. Ramsay saying
good-naturedly, "What a fellow you are for chaffin', Ketchum! Just you
hook it out of this, will you, and let us get on with this? One and two