The girl had stiffened a little at our approach, as I could see, but a
young girl's stiffness is always rather amusing than otherwise, and I
did not mind it. Neither, that I could see, did Mr. Glendenning, and it
soon passed. It seemed that she had left her mother lying down in her
state-room, where she justly imagined that if she did not see the rapids
she should suffer less alarm from them; the young lady had come frankly
to the side of Mrs. March as soon as she saw her, and asked if she might
sit with her. She now talked to me for a decent space of time, and then
presently, without my knowing how, she was talking to Mr. Glendenning,
and they were comparing notes of Niagara; he was saying that he thought
he had seen her at the Cataract House, and she was owning that she and
her mother had at least stopped at that hotel.


III.

I have no wish, and if I had the wish I should not have the art, to keep
back the fact that these young people were evidently very much taken
with each other. They showed their mutual pleasure so plainly that even
I could see it. As for Mrs. March, she was as proud of it as if she had
invented them and set them going in their advance toward each other,
like two mechanical toys.

I confess that with reference to what my wife had told me of this young
lady's behavior when she was with her mother, her submissiveness, her
entire self-effacement, up to a certain point, I did not know quite what
to make of her present independence, not to say freedom. I thought she
might perhaps have been kept so strictly in the background, with young
men, that she was rather disposed to make the most of any chance at them
which offered. If the young man in this case was at no pains to hide his