"Like it?" he echoed. "That's the trouble. I wish I weren't so full of the meaning of it all. Can you fancy how a monk might feel, who'd been away on a vacation, just getting back to his cell? _Like_ it? I can't help liking it. It's my proper setting; I see that fast enough. But I've come back to find how inexorable and harsh and catechismical it is, and naturally I resent being what I am. Oh--" he broke off, suddenly realizing the folly of his harangue, and after another moment he added: "It's delightful, Julia dear, really. If only all the Westerners could come to New England and revive it--and all the New-Englanders move West and revive themselves!" They went on from room to room. "You Westerners," Hastings reiterated--"oh, I don't just know what the difference is, for you're New England, too. Only you've got so much else mixed up with it. You've become free-lances; your more recent, less bigoted adventures have made you forget." "What?" asked Julia, indignantly. But he was at a loss, as he looked about him, to explain, however much each new survey of the scene convinced him. "Here," he muttered, "everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously soaked--saturated--in the barren memory of it." "_You're_ not," said Julia, testily, to draw him out. "Precious little of it _you've_ had! Two years at a school! You're more foreign than you are New England. Remember--your--" "Yes. I don't forget I've one foreign ancestor to boast of, and bless Heaven for it! How my great-grandmother ever happened to marry--see this!" Hastings went on, incoherently catching her arm and waving his other over the exquisite array of her "colonial" chamber. "Now, this, to you, is--well--it's as 'amusing' as if you'd tried to furnish a room to imitate one in Cinderella's palace, as 'interesting' as if you'd done it Louis Sixteenth, or--or--its meaning is hardly more personal to you than the room you furnished in Munich that winter."--She blushed admiringly at memory of their first meeting.--"The problem appealed to you, and you made it charming. But to me--" "You really hate it," said Julia, determined to face the facts. "I really love it," he retorted sadly, "the way you couldn't help loving a parent, even though you mightn't believe in him." "Jack," she characteristically cried out to him again, "there is one thing more that I hardly dare show you then. You'll think me such a fool. I--" A servant appeared to announce that luncheon was ready. "Don't say anything to _them_ against it," she told him on the way down.