perhaps in the last analysis she was not a favorite. She was allowed to
be fascinating, but she was not felt to be flattering, and people would
rather be flattered than fascinated. In fact, the men were mostly afraid
of her; and it has been observed of girls of this kind that the men who
are not afraid of them are such as they would do well to be afraid of.
Whether that was quite the case with Bessie Lynde or not, it was certain
that she who was always the cleverest girl in the room, and if not the
prettiest, then the most effective, had not the best men about her. Her
men were apt to be those whom the other girls called stupid or horrid,
and whom it would not be easy, though it might be more just, to classify
otherwise. The other girls wondered what she could see in them; but
perhaps it was not necessary that she should see anything in them, if
they could see all she wished them to see, and no more, in her.

The room where tea was now brought and put before her was volumed round
by the collections of her grandfather, except for the spaces filled by
his portrait and that of earlier ancestors, going back to the time when
Copley made masterpieces of his fellow-Bostonians. Her aunt herself
looked a family portrait of the middle period, a little anterior to her
father's, but subsequent to her great-grandfather's. She had a comely
face, with large, smooth cheeks and prominent eyes; the edges of her
decorous brown wig were combed rather near their corners, and a fitting
cap palliated but did not deny the wig. She had the quiet but rather dull
look of people slightly deaf, and she had perhaps been stupefied by a
life of unalloyed prosperity and propriety. She had grown an old maid
naturally, but not involuntarily, and she was without the sadness or the
harshness of disappointment. She had never known much of the world,
though she had always lived in it. She knew that it was made up of two
kinds of people--people who were like her and people who were not like
her; and she had lived solely in the society of people who were like her,