nothing from his mother, would wait till after dinner. So, offering her
his arm, he led her out to where the table was spread, widely different
from the table prepared for Katy Lennox away among the Silverton hills,
for where at the farmhouse there had been only the homely wares common
to the country, with Aunt Betsy's onions served in a bowl, there was
here the finest of damask, the choicest of china, the costliest of
cut-glass, and the heaviest of silver, with the well-trained waiter
gliding in and out, himself the very personification of strict table
etiquette, such as the Barlows had never dreamed about. There was no
fricasseed chicken here, or flaky crust, with pickled beans and apple
sauce; no custard pie with strawberries and rich, sweet cream, poured
from a blue earthen pitcher, but there were soups, and fish, and roasted
meats, and dishes with French names and taste, and desert elaborately
gotten up and served with the utmost precision, and wines, with fruit
and colored cloth, and handsome finger bowl; and Mrs. Cameron presiding
over all, with the ladylike decorum so much a part of herself, her soft,
glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin seeming in
keeping with herself and her surroundings. And opposite to her Wilford
sat, a tall, dark, handsome man of thirty or thereabouts--a man whose
polished manners betokened at once a perfect knowledge of the world, and
whose face to a close observer indicated how little satisfaction he had
as yet found in that world. He had tried its pleasures, drinking the cup
of freedom and happiness to its very dregs, and though he thought he
liked it, he often found himself dissatisfied and reaching after
something which should make life more real, more worth the living for.
He had traveled all over Europe twice, had visited every spot worth
visiting in his own country, had been a frequenter of every fashionable
resort in New York, from the skating pond to the theatres, had been
admitted as a lawyer, had opened an office on Broadway, acquiring some
reputation in his profession, had looked at more than twenty girls with