Page:The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1885).djvu/104

100 on the back of the two chairs of that couple.) Vogelstein felt the peril, for he could immediately think of a dozen men he knew who had married American girls. There appeared now to be a constant danger of marrying the American girl; it was something one had to reckon with, like the railway, the telegraph, the discovery of dynamite, the Chassepôt rifle, the Socialistic spirit; it was one of the complications of modern life.

It would doubtless be too much to say that Vogelstein was afraid of falling in love with Pandora Day; a young woman who was not strikingly beautiful, and with whom he had talked, in all, but ten minutes. But, as I say, he went so far as to wish that the human belongings of a girl whose independence appeared to have no taint either of fastness, as they said in England, or of subversive opinion, and whose nose was so very well bred, should not be a little more distinguished. There was something almost comical in her attitude toward these belongings; she appeared to regard them as a care, but not as an interest; it was as if they had been intrusted to her honor, and she had engaged to convey them safe to a certain point; she was detached and inadvertent; then, suddenly, she remembered, repented, and came back to tuck her parents into their blankets, to alter the position of her mother's umbrella, to tell them something about the run of the ship. These little offices were usually performed deftly, rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their daughter came