“Oh-h. What else?” “We went in after that.” “And he was just as funny as ever,” said Bella, clutching at frail comfort. “Oh, quite,” agreed Hildegarde. It was small consolation to Miss Bella that Cheviot was singular in his obduracy. Before she was eighteen she was uncommonly well accustomed to seeing the stoutest masculine defenses go down before her. The two Mar boys had long been her devoted slaves. And Bella had flirted with both of them impartially, taking what she felt was only a becoming share in the interest all Valdivia felt in those go-ahead young men, whenever they came home for a visit. They were pointed to as models. Look how they “got on”—they did it visibly—while you looked they seemed to have to restrain themselves from rising out of your sight. They kept Miss Bella supplied with candy and flowers and they corresponded with her when she went abroad. Secretly dreading the fascinations of the Britisher, they asked in scoffing postscripts how the effete nations were getting on. Bella’s view of all this was that, provided the young men were “nice,” a girl could hardly have too many of them contending for her favor. It was what they were there for. Each time she came home, she brought the Mar boys a scarf-pin apiece, and pleased them still more by invariably demanding a cent in return. “I can’t _give_ you a thing with a point. Something dreadful would happen! you must buy them.” That looked, they felt, as if she were “taking it seriously”—but which was she taking? The year that Bella was eighteen, after a summer in England, she arrived at Staten Island just in time to celebrate her birthday. She was full of joy at getting back. The conscious approval that she bestowed on the greater splendor of the American autumn had been generously extended to the profusion of fine fruit that greets one here at breakfast, to the individual bathrooms, even to the spacious, drawered, behooked, and shelved clothes-closets so agreeably numerous in the American house. The same satisfaction with which she had noted these things consciously revisited her as she trod the wide, shallow steps of the staircase, that in its descent halted leisurely upon two broad landings, having each a large unglazed window opening upon the hall below. The observant young eyes paid a flitting tribute to the beautiful woodwork of the balusters and the great tall doors of the rooms she passed, deciding as she went, there’s nothing nicer than a new American house, unless it’s an old (and a very old) English one. Even then, to _live_ in, give her the American.