with the sweetest overtures of neighborliness by the Bentleys. They
waited, of course, till we were settled in our house before they came to
call upon Mrs. March, but they had been preceded by several hospitable
offerings from their garden, their dairy, and their hen-house, which
were very welcome in the days of our first uncertainty as to
trades-people. We analyzed this hospitality as an effect of that sort of
nature in Mrs. Bentley which can equally assert its superiority by
blessing or banning. Evidently, since chance had again thrown us in her
way, she would not go out of it to be offensive, but would continue in
it, and make the best of us.

No doubt Glendenning had talked us into the Bentleys; and this my wife
said she hated most of all; for we should have to live up to the notion
of us imparted by a young man from the impressions of the moment when he
saw us purple in the light of his dawning love. In justice to
Glendenning, however, I must say that he did nothing, by a show of his
own assiduities, to urge us upon the Bentleys after we came to
Gormanville. If we had not felt so sure of him, we might have thought he
was keeping his regard for us a little too modestly in the background.
He made us one cool little call, the evening of our arrival, in which he
had the effect of anxiety to get away as soon as possible; and after
that we saw him no more until he came with Miss Bentley and her mother a
week later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable because his
church and his rectory were just across the street from the Conwell
place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their wooden
gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green in front of
them was planted.

During all that time Glendenning's personal elevation remained invisible
to us, and we began to wonder if he were not that most lamentable of