door-bell rang, and another visitor interrupted her talk with Mrs.
Saintsbury.




IX.

Mrs. Pasmer's husband looked a great deal older than herself, and, by
operation of a well-known law of compensation, he was lean and silent,
while she was plump and voluble. He had thick eyebrows, which remained
black after his hair and beard had become white, and which gave him an
aspect of fierceness, expressive of nothing in his character. It was from
him that their daughter got her height, and, as Mrs. Pasmer freely owned,
her distinction.

Soon after their marriage the Pasmers had gone to live in Paris, where
they remained faithful to the fortunes of the Second Empire till its
fall, with intervals of return to their own country of a year or two
years at a time. After the fall of the Empire they made their sojourn in
England, where they lived upon the edges and surfaces of things, as
Americans must in Europe everywhere, but had more permanency of feeling
than they had known in France, and something like a real social status.
At one time it seemed as if they might end their days there; but that
which makes Americans different from all other peoples, and which finally
claims their allegiance for their own land, made them wish to come back
to America, and to come back to Boston. After all, their place in England
was strictly inferior, and must be. They knew titles, and consorted with
them, but they had none themselves, and the English constancy which kept
their friends faithful to them after they had become an old story, was