“Perhaps,” Florence helped her out, “he’s going for the same reason that you are?” Cissy looked both blank and disconcerted. “Poor man, he’s usually too anxious for pleasure!” Florence explained. Cissy took it in seriously. “Really the fact is, a woman is _never_ free from her cares! But a man, when he rests, rests so completely!” She sighed, with her eyes on the door through which Fox Longacre had departed. She added inconsequently, “You know Emma has asked my cousin Charlie Thair. Of course it’s perfectly plain why Emma asked _him_. The wonder is that he dares to go!” Florence could only guess at the situation, but she thought the wonder would have been if Thair had dodged it. “Though it’s perfectly indecent of him, I’m sure, with his money, not to marry,” Cissy ran on; “and of course Julia is a magnificent creature. But the idea of expecting to really ‘land’ Charlie! It’s too funny! So like dear Emma.” Upon this point Florence was, silently, in accord with Mrs. Fitz Hugh. She could see—from Mrs. Budd’s point of view that every eligible man not only should, but sooner or later would, marry some suitable girl—how the proposition was a reasonable one. But she felt there was as slight a possibility of Charlie Thair’s being unseated from his bachelor state as from his hunting-saddle. “Was there”—it was the following thought—“such a scant possibility of Fox Longacre?” She turned from her vis-à-vis to the window, as the train, with a roar and a swing, rushed into the cañon, and fixed her eyes on the dizzy fascination of the whirling river below. The stream of events of the last five years was more rapid and intricate to the vision of her mind. The first light ripple on this stream was her clear memory of the charming, inconsequent American boy whom she had met in Vienna five years before. It had been on one of her trips, that were always solitary, since Captain Essington was too busy spending her neat little fortune in various very private and proper gambling-clubs to care how his wife amused herself. How this boy, Fox Longacre, with his facile Gallic Americanism, had stood out among the miscellaneous lot of students of the Vienna Conservatory! She remembered his passionate enthusiasm for the music that he whimsically called his “trade,” his spasmodic application. They had got on famously in their short, merry acquaintance. She had felt it the greatest pity in the world that he should be an orphan, a waif, with just enough money to let him be comfortably idle, and such potentialities of power running riot. She had regretted the end of that gay little friendship when she returned to her sad-colored London.