another person's mind and finding so many
strange objects there; but after a while the
thing began to assume an uncomfortably serious
aspect, and then there seemed to be something
almost terrible about it. At such times a call
from a gentleman of her own nation, even
though he were one of the placidly stupid type,
would be a positive relief; she could abandon
herself to the secure sense of being at home;
she need fear no surprises, and in the smooth
shallows of their talk there were no unsuspected
depths to excite and to baffle her ingenuity.
And, again, reverting in her thought to Halfdan,
his conversational brilliancy would almost
repel her, as something odious and un-American,
the cheap result of outlandish birth and
unrepublican education. Not that she had ever
valued republicanism very highly; she was one
of those who associated politics with noisy
vulgarity in speech and dress, and therefore
thanked fortune that women were permitted to
keep aloof from it. But in the presence of this
alien she found herself growing patriotic; that
much-discussed abstraction, which we call our
country (and which is nothing but the aggregate
of all the slow and invisible influences
which go toward making up our own being),
became by degrees a very palpable and
intelligible fact to her.