Murger and of 1830. And if disappointing in Paris, how much more so in
Chicago?--where impropriety was still wholly incapable of presenting
itself in a guise that could enlist the sympathies of the fastidious.
Truesdale, whether or no, found himself restricted within reasonable
bounds by his own good taste. Nor was Paston permitted much greater
latitude; whatever his taste, the condition of his finances would alone
have checked him from straying too widely outside the beaten path.

Paston was less reticent about the worldly status of himself and his
family than might have been expected; he treated the subject in a broad,
free fashion, with a great pretense to openness. Few apprehended the
general and essential cautiousness of his disclosures; most people fell
easily enough into the notion that so much frank jocularity had no other
object than to entertain them; the young man was doubtless exaggerating,
possibly inventing.

"Absurd situation, isn't it?" he would set forth in his large and genial
way. "Poor father! six girls to see married off; and five boys to start
in life--quite as bad. One in the Army, one in the Navy, one in the
Church, one in the Civil Service, and one--in America. No other way;
somebody had to come to America--the youngest, naturally. And here he
is."

"Fancy that, Bessie! Imagine that, Allie!" his hearers would cry. Then
they would ask him about the fox-hunting in Bucks, and tease him for
further particulars about his sister Edith, who had married Lord
Such-a-one.

The subject of America he treated with some tact--with some forbearance,
he himself may have thought. If asked point-blank whether he liked it, he