Page:The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1885).djvu/147

Rh his wife. Such a wife as that would wish to push him, and he could hardly admit to himself that this was what fate had in reserve for him,—to be propelled, in his career, by a young lady who would perhaps attempt to talk to the Kaiser as he had heard her the other night talk to the President. Would she consent to terminate relations with her family, or would she wish still to borrow plastic relief from that domestic background? That her family was so impossible was to a certain extent an advantage; for, if they had been a little better, the question of a rupture would be less easy. Vogelstein turned over these questions in spite of his security, or, perhaps, indeed, because of it. The security made them speculative and disinterested.

They haunted him during the excursion to Mount Vernon, which took place according to traditions long established. Mrs. Steuben's confederates assembled on the steamer, and were set afloat on the big brown stream which had already seemed to Vogelstein to have too much bosom and too little bank. Here and there, however, he became conscious of a shore where there was something to look at, even though he was conscious at the same time that he had of old lost great opportunities of idyllic talk in not sitting beside Pandora Day on the deck of the North German Lloyd. The two turned round together to contemplate Alexandria, which for Pandora, as she declared, was a picture of Old Virginia. She told Vogelstein that she was always hearing about it during the Civil