This was all that happened on that ride--it was all that had ever happened--but in it, Arthur Holyoke had made bold to ask his cousin to become his wife; and she had bade him wait till evening for his answer; and then they both had ridden home. A city groom would have seen nothing of it all; yet these things had been done. A short probation, you will say, until the evening only; and Arthur hardly thought of it as such, but walked home briskly, hat in hand, castle-building; his dark gray eyes turned inward, and the wind making free with his curly, undecided-colored hair. For what probation was there more, after all their lives had so far been together, than living on together, man and wife? Not that she loved him then so much as he loved her--but that was to be expected. She loved him more than he deserved, he knew; but then, that is true of most pairs, and the men must needs not waste their pity, but resign themselves, as it is the way of women. And Arthur walked along the straight garden path that led from door to highway in Judge Holyoke’s old place, switching off the prim asters with his riding-cane. For his uncle’s house was built in the days of gardens, not of lawns--can we not imagine the large contempt with which the dwellers of a prairie would regard a barbered rood or two of grass?--and the flowers were part of Gracie’s presence there, and she of them. Arthur was not too stout, but strong and graceful, almost Greek in figure as in face; a strange, strong scion of that narrow-chested clergyman-father, so stout in spirit, but so fragile in this world, who had died and left him to his uncle’s care, the Judge. There are many such: it seems our people (like some mute, inglorious poet) have had their period of pale and interesting youth, and now are comfortably stout and genial, in their easy-going middle age, the wasting spiritual fires quelled: like a sometime tractarian clergyman, now optimistic in a fat living. Arthur, however (not to carry the analogy too far), was spiritual enough in his way, though not the orthodox; delicately balanced, mobile, imaginative, Celtic more than Saxon, and rather Greek than either. Nor could you truly say that his way wanted depth, unless depth means sluggishness or stillness. Arthur was a New Englander, and New England is in reality the essence of all things American, in germ and future; and the people, the crowds, are already rather Greek than English. Irreverent, fond of novelty and quick--in politics, if not in art, they are Athenian. The public of Aristophanes is the public of the American burlesque; of lions, fair ladies, lecturers; of advertised politics, priests and prophets, of the mind-cure and of the secular Sunday newspaper.