Page:The Aspern Papers.djvu/160

 you remember—ever so long ago—that you wouldn't look at anything in Europe that was not a thousand years old? Well, as we advance in life I suppose we don't think that's quite such a charm.' And when I told her that I had come to Homburg because it was as good a place as another to wait for my nephew, she exclaimed: 'Your nephew—what nephew? He must have come up of late.' I answered that he was a youth named Archer Pringle and very modern indeed; he was coming of age in a few months and was in Europe for the first time. My last news of him had been from Paris and I was expecting to hear from him from one day to the other. His father was dead, and though a selfish bachelor, little versed in the care of children, I was considerably counted on by his mother to see that he did not smoke too much nor fall off an Alp.

Mrs. Pallant immediately guessed that his mother was my sister Charlotte, whom she spoke of familiarly, though I knew she had seen her but once or twice. Then in a moment it came to her which of the Pringles Charlotte had married; she remembered the family perfectly, in the old New York days—'that disgustingly rich lot.' She said it was very nice having the boy come out that way to my care; to which I replied that it was very nice for him. She declared that she meant for me—I ought to have had children; there was something so parental about me and I would have brought them up so well. She could make an allusion like that—to all that might have been and had not been—without a gleam of guilt in her eye; and I foresaw that before I left the place I should have confided to her that though I detested her and was very glad we had fallen out, yet our old