He turned on her his handsome young face of profane wonder. “Shall I tell you something? A young man in my position, as you call it—” “I didn’t invent the term,” she interposed. “I’ve seen it in a great many books.” “Hang it, you’re always at your books! A fellow in my position then does well enough at the worst—he muddles along whatever he does. That’s about what I mean to say.” “Well, if your own people are content with you,” Bessie laughed, “it’s not for me to complain. But I shall always think that properly you should have a great mind—a great character.” “Ah, that’s very theoretic!” the young man promptly brought out. “Depend upon it, that’s a Yankee prejudice.” “Happy the country then,” she as eagerly declared, “where people’s prejudices make so for light.” He stopped short, with his slightly strained gaiety, as for the pleasantness of high argument. “What it comes to then is that we’re all here a pack of fools and me the biggest of the lot?” “I said nothing so rude of a great people—and a great person. But I must repeat that you personally are—in your representative capacity that’s to be—disappointing.” “My dear Miss Alden,” he simply cried at this, “I’m the best fellow in the world!” “Ah, if it were not for that!” she beautifully smiled. Mrs. Westgate had many more friends in London than she pretended, and before long had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their hospitality was prompt, so that, one thing leading to another, she began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw a good deal of what she took great pleasure in calling to herself English society. She went to balls and danced, she went to dinners and talked, she went to concerts and listened—at concerts Bessie always listened—she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated persons, authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen, of whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder and who now, as part of the frequent furniture of London drawing-rooms, struck her as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable—revealing also sometimes on contact qualities not to have been predicted of bodies sidereal. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation, lost in this way certain fond illusions; but on the other hand she had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she laid bare the wealth of her emotions to a dear friend of her own sex in Boston, with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her sentiments indeed she sought mildly to flash upon Lord Lambeth, who came almost every day to Jones’s Hotel and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India; and of several others of this lady’s ex-pensioners—gentlemen who, as she said, had made, in New York, a