"I can make no explanation. I exonerate the lady fully and do not
justify myself."

Miss Allen seems to have been a woman of the sensitive American
type which was so common in the early and the middle part of the
last century. Mrs. Trollope has described it for us with very
little exaggeration. Dickens has drawn it with a touch of malice,
and yet not without truth. Miss Martineau described it during her
visit to this country, and her account quite coincides with those
of her two contemporaries.

Indeed, American women of that time unconsciously described
themselves in a thousand different ways. They were, after all,
only a less striking type of the sentimental Englishwomen who read
L. E. L. and the earlier novels of Bulwer-Lytton. On both sides of
the Atlantic there was a reign of sentiment and a prevalence of
what was then called "delicacy." It was a die-away, unwholesome
attitude toward life and was morbid to the last degree.

In circles where these ideas prevailed, to eat a hearty dinner was
considered unwomanly. To talk of anything except some gilded
"annual," or "book of beauty," or the gossip of the neighborhood
was wholly to be condemned. The typical girl of such a community
was thin and slender and given to a mild starvation, though she
might eat quantities of jam and pickles and saleratus biscuit. She
had the strangest views of life and an almost unnatural shrinking
from any usual converse with men.

Houston, on his side, was a thoroughly natural and healthful man,