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April Hopes by William Dean Howells
page 53 of 445 (11%)
wish him to be a lawyer?"

"His father wishes him to be a wall-paper maker."

"And the young man compromises on the law. I see," said Mrs. Pasmer. "And
you say he's been going into Boston a great deal? Where does he go?"

The ladies entered into this social inquiry with a zest which it would be
hard to make the reader share, or perhaps to feel the importance of. It
is enough that it ended in the social vindication of Dan Mavering. It
would not have been enough for Mrs Pasmer that he was accepted in the
best Cambridge houses; she knew of old how people were accepted in
Cambridge for their intellectual brilliancy or solidity, their personal
worth, and all sorts of things, without consideration of the mystical
something which gives vogue in Boston.

"How superb Alice was!" Mrs. Saintsbury broke off abruptly. "She has such
a beautiful manner. Such repose."

"Repose! Yes," said her mother, thoughtfully. "But she's very intense.
And I don't see where she gets it. Her father has repose enough, but he
has no intensity; and I'm all intensity, and no repose. But I'm no more
like my mother than Alice is like me."

"I think she has the Hibbins face," said Mrs. Saintsbury.

"Oh! she's got the Hibbins face," said Mrs Pasmer, with a disdain of tone
which she did not at all feel; the tone was mere absent-mindedness.

She was about to revert to the question of Mavering's family, when the
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