The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of many successive days in the cultivation, right and left, far and near, of this celerity of social progress. They agreed that it was all extremely jolly—that they had never known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to report the detail of their sojourn on this charming shore; though were it convenient I might present a record of impressions none the less soothing that they were not exhaustively analysed. Many of them still linger in the minds of our travellers, attended by a train of harmonious images—images of early breezy shining hours on lawns and piazzas that overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls saying innumerable quaint and familiar things; of infinite lounging and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of a confidence that broke down, of a freedom that pulled up, nowhere; of an idyllic ease that was somehow too ordered for a primitive social consciousness and too innocent for a developed; of occasions on which they so knew every one and everything that they almost ached with reciprocity; of drives and rides in the late afternoon, over gleaming beaches, on long sea-roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvellous sunsets; of tea-tables, on the return, informal, irregular, agreeable; of evenings at open windows or on the perpetual verandahs, in the summer starlight, above the warm Atlantic and amid irrelevant outbursts of clever minstrelsy. The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained by everybody, intimate with everybody, and it was all the book of life, of American life, at least; with the chapter of “complications” bodily omitted. At the end of three days they had removed their luggage from the hotel and had gone to stay with Mrs. Westgate—a step as to which Percy Beaumont at first took up an attitude of mistrust apparently founded on some odd and just a little barbaric talk forced on him, he would have been tempted to say, and very soon after their advent, by Miss Alden. He had indeed been aware of her occasional approach or appeal, since she wasn’t literally always in conversation with Lord Lambeth. He had meditated on Mrs. Westgate’s account of her sister and discovered for himself that the young lady was “sharp” (Percy’s critical categories remained few and simple) and appeared to have read a great deal. She seemed perfectly well-bred, though he couldn’t make out that, as Mrs. Westgate funnily insisted, she was shy. If she was shy she carried it off with an ease—! “Mr. Beaumont,” she had said, “please tell me something about Lord Lambeth’s family. How would you say it in England?—his position.” “His position?” Percy’s instinct was to speak as if he had never heard of such a matter. “His rank—or whatever you call it. Unfortunately we haven’t got a ‘Peerage,’ like the people in Thackeray.”