regard to it. She had learned from her former visits home that it was
frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years which they had spent
chiefly abroad, she had observed the decay of that distinction which
formerly attended returning sojourners from Europe. She had seen them
cease gradually from the romantic reverence which once clothed them, and
decline through a gathering indifference into something like slight and
compassion, as people who have not been able to make their place or hold
their own at home; and she had taught herself so well how to pocket the
superiority natural to the Europeanised American before arriving at
consciousness of this disesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people
who had always stayed at home.

In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for her
that she flattered adroitly always. But adroitness in flattery is not
necessary for its successful use. There is no morsel of it too gross for
the condor gullet and the ostrich stomach of human vanity; there is no
society in which it does not give the utterer instant honour and
acceptance in greater or less degree. Mrs. Pasmer, who was very
good-natured, employed it because she liked it herself, and knowing how
absolutely worthless it was from her own tongue, prized it from others.
She could have rested perfectly safe without it in her social position,
which she found unchanged by years of absence. She had not been a Hibbins
for nothing, and she was not a Pasmer for nothing, though why she should
have been either for something it would not be easy to say.

But while confessing the foibles of Mrs. Pasmer, it would not be fair to
omit from the tale of her many virtues the final conscientiousness of her
openly involuted character. Not to mention other things, she instituted
and practised economies as alien to her nature as to her husband's, and
in their narrowing affairs she kept him out of debt. She was prudent; she