different role she had to sustain in society. They began to ask
themselves what it was for, and to question whether, if she could not
marry a noble Englishman, Alice had not better marry a good American.

Even with Mrs. Pasmer this question was tacit, and it need not be
explained to any one who knows our life that in her most worldly dreams
she intended at the bottom of her heart that her daughter should marry
for love. It is the rule that Americans marry for love, and the very rare
exception that they marry for anything else; and if our divorce courts
are so busy in spite of this fact, it is perhaps because the Americans
also unmarry for love, or perhaps because love is not so sufficient in
matters of the heart as has been represented in the literature of people
who have not been able to give it so fair a trial. But whether it is all
in all in marriage, or only a very marked essential, it is certain that
Mrs. Pasmer expected her daughter's marriage to involve it. She would
have shrunk from intimating anything else to her as from a gross
indecency; and she could not possibly, by any finest insinuation, have
made her a partner in her design for her happiness. That, so far as Alice
was concerned, was a thing which was to fall to her as from heaven; for
this also is part of the American plan. We are the children of the poets,
the devotees of the romancers, so far as that goes; and however material
and practical we are in other things, in this we are a republic of
shepherds and shepherdesses, and we live in a golden age; which if it
sometimes seems an age of inconvertible paper, is certainly so through no
want of faith in us.

Though the Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice's sake, they
both understood that they were going home experimentally, and not with
the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unless they
liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had no illusions in