“Young men like Hayn can’t ever marry out of their own circle: you should be able to see that. How can they buy houses for their wives, and furnish them properly, and set up horses and carriages, and keep in society?” “Mamma, you’re too dreadfully funny; indeed you are. Suppose young men aren’t rich enough to marry; can’t girls like them? Aren’t young people good for anything but to get married?” “I’m very sorry,” said the mother, abruptly leaving the room, “that you have such trifling views of life.” When Philip Hayn left the family mansion, a little after midnight, he had but two distinct ideas: one was that he had better find his way back to Sol Mantring’s sloop to sleep, and the other was that he didn’t believe he could fall asleep again in less than a week. All that he had seen, the people not excepted, was utterly unlike Haynton. The conversation, also, was new, although he could not remember much of it; and the ladies--well, he always had admired whatever was admirable in the young women in the village, but there certainly were no such handsome and brilliant girls at Haynton as some he had met that night. He could not explain to himself the difference, except that, compared with Lucia’s friends, his old acquaintances appeared--well, rather unfinished and ignorant. And as far as these new acquaintances appeared above his older ones, so far did Lucia appear above her friends. He had studied her face scores of times before, and told himself where it was faulty; now he mentally withdrew every criticism he had ever made, and declared her perfection itself. Would he ever forget how she looked as she offered to help him from that easy-chair in the library? He wished his mother might have seen her at that instant; then he was glad she did not. He remembered that his mother did not entirely approve of some of Lucia’s bathing-dresses; what would the good woman think of fashionable evening attire? And yet perhaps it was not as dreadful as it seemed: evidently Lucia’s mother approved of it, and was not she a member of a church,--not, he regretted, of the faith in which all Haynton worshipped, yet still a church? And did not many of Lucia’s guests dress in similar style?