such great personal advantages, she should wish to see the world--
even to show herself to the world,--and find in it some agreeable
youth who should admire her, and desire to make her his own for
ever. Compare this simple and natural longing with the insatiate
greed and ambition of one of our own sex, I urged him, and then talk
to me, if you can, of this poor girl's selfishness! A young man has
more egoism in an hour than a young girl has in her whole life. She
thinks she wishes some one to be devoted to her, but she really
wishes some one to let her be devoted to him; and how passively, how
negatively, she must manage to accomplish her self-sacrifice! He,
on the contrary, means to go conquering and enslaving forward; to be
in and out of love right and left, and to end, after many years of
triumph, in the possession of the best and wisest and fairest of her
sex. I know the breed, my dear sir; I have been a young man myself.
We men have liberty, we have initiative; we are not chaperoned; we
can go to this one and that one freely and fearlessly. But women
must sit still, and be come to or shied off from. They cannot cast
the bold eye of interest; they can at most bridle under it, and
furtively respond from the corner of the eye of weak hope and gentle
deprecation. Be patient, then, with this poor child if she darkles
a little under the disappointment of not finding Saratoga so
personally gay as she supposed it would be, and takes it out of you
and your wife, as if you were to blame for it, in something like
sulks.

He remained silent under these tacit appeals, but at the end he
heaved a deep sigh, as he might if he were acknowledging their
justice, and were promising to do his very best in the
circumstances. His wife looked round at him, but did not speak. In
fact, they none of them spoke after the first words of greeting to