Mrs. Ellison could not quite make out how much Kitty really meant of
what she had said. She gasped once or twice for argument; then she sat
up, and beat the sofa-pillows vengefully in composing herself anew, and
finally, "Well, Kitty, I'm sure I don't know what to make of it all,"
she said with a sigh.

"Why, we're not obliged to make anything of it, Fanny, there's that
comfort," replied Kitty; and then there was a silence, while she brooded
over the whole affair of her acquaintance with Mr. Arbuton, which this
talk had failed to set in a more pleasant or hopeful light. It had begun
like a romance; she had pleased her fancy, if not her heart, with the
poetry of it; but at last she felt exiled and strange in his presence.
She had no right to a different result, even through any deep feeling in
the matter; but while she owned, with her half-sad, half-comical
consciousness, that she had been tacitly claiming and expecting too
much, she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal compassion,
as if it wore some other girl whose pretty dream had been broken. Its
ruin involved the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that there
had been gradually rising in her mind an image of Boston, different
alike from the holy place of her childhood, the sacred city of the
antislavery heroes and martyrs, and from the jesting, easy, sympathetic
Boston of Mr. and Mrs. March. This new Boston with which Mr. Arbuton
inspired her was a Boston of mysterious prejudices and lofty
reservations; a Boston of high and difficult tastes, that found its
social ideal in the Old World, and that shrank from contact with the
reality of this; a Boston as alien as Europe to her simple experiences,
and that seemed to be proud only of the things that were unlike other
American things; a Boston that would rather perish by fire and sword
than be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, and reluctant
Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly