Meanwhile, since her long evening with John Harrington on the ice, she had made every effort to avoid his society. Like many very young women with a vivid love of enjoyment and a fairly wide experience, she was something of a fatalist. That is to say, she believed that her evil destiny might spring upon her unawares at any moment, and she felt something when she was with Harrington that warned her. For the first time in her life she knew what it was to have moods of melancholy; she caught herself asking what was really the end and object of her gay life, whether it amounted to anything worthy in comparison with the trouble one had to take to amuse one's self, whether it would not be far better in the end to live like Miss Schenectady, reading and studying and caring nothing for the world. Not that Josephine admired Miss Schenectady, or thought that she herself could ever be like her. The old lady was a type of her class; intelligent and well versed in many subjects--even learned she might have been called by some. But to Joe's view, essentially European by nature and education, it seemed as though her aunt, like many Bostonians, judged everything--literature, music, art of all kinds, history and the doings of great men--by one invariable standard. Her comments on what she heard and read were uniformly delivered from the same point of view, in the same tone of practical judgment, and with the same assumption of original superiority. It was the everlasting "Carthago delenda" of the Roman orator. Whatever the world wrote, sang, painted, thought, or did, the conviction remained unshaken in Miss Schenectady's mind that Beacon Street was better than those things, and that of all speeches and languages known and spoken in the world's history, the familiar dialect of Boston was the one best calculated by Providence and nature to express and formulate all manner of wisdom. It is a strange thing that where criticism is on the whole so fair, and cultivation of the best faculties so general, the manner of expressing a judgment and of exhibiting acquired knowledge should be such as to jar unpleasantly on the sensibilities of Europeans. Where is the real difference? It probably lies in some subtle point of proportion in the psychic chemistry of the Boston mind, but the analyst who shall express the formula is not yet born; though there be those who can cast the spectrum of Boston existence and thought upon their printed screens with matchless accuracy.