She in turn looked over at Mr. Caryl Wemyss, sitting opposite; he met her eye with a glance of adoration that seemed affected to sharp-sighted Flossie. A well-bred polished person this; but hardly that Guy Livingstone of her youthful fancy. The journey was certainly tedious; they were not at Hartford yet, and she looked out the window and watched the rude fences of her native land fly by, in dwindling perspective. She half-divined his thoughts--he was still reflecting of de Musset and George Sand; of Byron and the Countess Guiccioli; or perhaps, more recently, of Lord Eskdale, his friend, and Mrs. White-Thompson. She, however, for long had had no romance in her composition; but only love of adventure, admiration, social primacy, for good or evil. She tried to banish her companion from her mind, and scheme of future triumphs. Yet she knew that his position was safer in the world than hers. Already the gray day was growing dark; and the monotonous white wooden houses that they passed were beginning to be lit with evening lamps. The empty fields and wooded hills about them made her lonely; and she pictured to herself, with a shudder, their commonplace firesides. Heavens, how stupid a thing must life be to some! They passed an ugly manufacturing village with its dull, wide streets and garniture of unpainted wood; and her fancy seemed to paint to her all their obscurity of life, their ox-like submission, with really no more faith or virtue, as she thought, than she, only more hypocrisy and less courage. Yet she remembered just such a village, hereabout, in her awkward youth; and something of the view of life it taught came back to her, now; abandoned, as it had been, from her very girlhood. So this was the climax, after all! And all her triumphs and all her cleverness had led to this? Some people would call it but a common elopement, and say that her position in respectable society was gone forever. She had not valued this, nor all these things, when she had got them; not even perhaps as any Jenny Starbuck valued her diamond ring; would she care for them more, now she had lost them? She fancied not. And she looked over the unpicturesque New-England landscape and pretended that she was a French duchess, travelling in some barbaric province. And then she looked at Mr. Wemyss once more, and again half wished that it had been Van Kull. She knew very well that there was no _grande passion_ in her case. When they got to Springfield, Wemyss got out; and came back in some trepidation. “I have seen Charlie Clarendon,” said he; “but I don’t think that he noticed me.” “And what does it matter whether he noticed you or not?” said Flossie, opening her eyes.