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A Chance Acquaintance by William Dean Howells
page 95 of 203 (46%)
memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the
middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an
odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.

Fanny, of course, couldn't go to church with me, and Dick got out of
it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I
trudged off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here. I didn't
dwell much upon him in my last letter, and I don't believe now I can
make him quite clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad, and he
is Europeanized enough not to think much of America, though I can't
find that he quite approves of Europe, and his experience seems not
to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere.

He isn't the Bostonian of Uncle Jack's imagination, and I suspect he
wouldn't like to be. He is rather too young, still, to have much of
an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, I think
that he would not have been a John Brown man. I am afraid that he
believes in "vulgar and meretricious distinctions" of all sorts, and
that he hasn't an atom of "magnanimous democracy" in him. In fact, I
find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which I thought were
held only in England, and which I had never seriously thought of,
seem actually a part of Mr. Arbuton's nature or education. He talks
about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good
families, as I supposed nobody in _this_ country _ever_ did,--in
earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had
such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke
out somebody's unhappiness,--to keep the high-born daughter from
marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of
in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I
could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in
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