"Then why did you come to Saratoga?" she asked quickly. "You oughtn't to have come if you meant nothing by it." "When I left England I did mean something," I answered, "but I learned a fact yesterday which has altered my intentions." And then I told her about Mr. Hitchcock's revelations, and the reflections to which they had given rise. Ida listened patiently to all my faint arguments, for I felt my courage quailing under her pretty sympathetic glance, and then she said decisively, "You are quite right and yet quite wrong." "Explain yourself, O Sphinx," I answered, much relieved by her words. "Why," she said, "you are quite right to hesitate, quite wrong to decide. I know you don't want my money; I know you don't like it, even: but I ask you to take me in spite of it. Of course that is dreadfully unwomanly and unconventional, and so forth, but it is what I ought to do.... Listen to me, Cyril (may I call you Cyril?). I will tell you why I want you to marry me. Before I went to Europe, I was dissatisfied with all these rich American young men. I hated their wealth, and their selfishness, and their cheap cynicism, and their trotting horses, and their narrow views, and their monotonous tall-talk, all cast in a stereotyped American mould, so that whenever I said A, I knew every one of them would answer B. "I went to Europe and I met your English young men, with their drawls, and their pigeon-shooting, and their shaggy ulsters, and their conventional wit, and their commonplace chaff, and their utter contempt for women, as though we were all a herd of marketable animals from whom they could pick and choose whichever pleased them best, according to their lordly fancy. I would no more give myself up to one of them than I would marry my cousin, Jefferson Hitchcock. But when I met you first at Nice, I saw you were a different sort of person. You could think and act for yourself, and you could appreciate a real living woman who could think and act too. You taught me what Europe was like. I only knew the outside, you showed me how to get within the husk. You made me admire Eza, and Roccabrunna, and Iffley Church. You roused something within me that I never felt before--a wish to be a different being, a longing for something more worth living for than diamonds and Saratoga. I know I am not good enough for you: I don't know enough or read enough or feel enough; but I don't want to fall back and sink to the level of New York society. So I have a _right_ to ask you to marry me if you will. I don't want to be a blue; but I want not to feel myself a social doll. You know yourself--I see you know it--that I oughtn't to throw away my chance of making the best of what nature I may have in me. I am only a beginner. I scarcely half understand your world yet. I can't properly admire your Botticellis and your Pinturiccios, I know; but I want to admire, I should like to, and I will try. I want you to take me, because I know