How impossible it was that she would ever be reconciled to the daughter of her cook and butcher, who added to her other faults the enormity of wearing dollar jewelry! And I think that last really hurt Everard the most. On such points he was very fastidious and particular, and more than once had himself thought Josey’s dress too flashy, but the glamour of love was over all, and a glance of her blue eyes, or touch of her white hands always set him right again and brought him back to his allegiance. But the hands and the eyes were not there now to stand between him and what his mother had said, and he felt like crying out bitterly as he took back his photograph and listened a few moments longer, while his mother talked lovingly and kindly, telling him he must forgive her if she had seemed harsh, that it was for his good, as he would one day see. He would forget this boyish fancy in time and come to wonder at his infatuation. Forget it! with those words ever in his ears, “I pronounce you man and wife.” He could _not_ forget, and it was not quite sure that he would do so if he could. Josey’s face and Josey’s wiles had a power over him yet to keep him comparatively loyal. He had loved her with all the intensity of a boy’s first fervent passion, which never stopped to criticise her manner, or language, or style of dress, though, now that his eyes were opened a little, it occurred to him that there might be something flashy in her appearance, and something told him that the massive chain and cross, so conspicuous on Josephine’s bosom, came from that store in Pittsfield, where everything was a dollar, from an immense picture down to a set of spoons. And his mother had detected it, by what subtle intuition he could not guess; and had traced her origin back to a butcher and a cook! Well, what then? Was Josey the worse for that? Was it not America’s boast that the children of butchers, and bakers, and candlestick-makers should stand in the high places and give rule? Certainly it was, and his mother herself had said it was neither birth nor blood which made the lady. It was a nobleness from within asserting itself without, and stamping its impress upon its possessor. And had Josephine this inborn refinement and nobility, or had she not? That was the point which troubled the young man as he went out from his mother’s presence, and sought a little arbor in a retired part of the grounds where he would be free to think it out. With his head, which was aching terribly, bowed upon his hands, he went over all the past as connected with Josephine, detecting here and there many a word and act which, alas, went far toward proving that his mother’s estimate of her was not very wrong. But how did his mother divine it? Had women some secret method of reading each other unknown to the other sex. Could Beatrice read her, too, from that photograph, and what would Bee’s verdict be? He wished he knew; wished he could show it to her