As he thought of the newly discovered country he was soon to enter, so strange to him, he felt that he, also, was strange to himself. He tried to bring back his old nature of the boulevards, Longchamp and Trouville; but it seemed to him childish and obsolete; showy and senseless, like a pasteboard suit of stage armor. He did not regret it. He was a man and an American; men were earnest, life in America was earnest. He knew little of his own city; but he had read the current novels; and he thought that he had seen enough to know that the every-day life in America was tangible, material, and the life of society what it should be, a gay leisure, a surface of pleasure and rest. Now, in Paris it was the every-day life that was trivial; the theatres were filled with vaudevilles; but the tragedies were everywhere, off the stage. It was well, the young man felt, that he was an American; his life had begun too sternly for a more artificial state of society; he lacked more than other people, and he demanded more from the world. So the Friday night in question found him arrayed in the normal evening costume of modern times. It wore somewhat awkwardly and strangely at first; and one or two little minutiæ of dress he did not know at all; as, whether gentlemen in America would wear gold studs, and how they tied their cravats. A waiter met him in the hall holding a plate, on which were several little envelopes, one of which bore his name. I suppose, thought he, in a country where there is no precedence, but much formality, this indicates whom we are to take in to dinner. He opened his envelope and found within a card, and written in a feminine hand _Miss Baby Thomas_. What an intolerable name! Coming above into the reception room, his first impressions were decidedly favorable. John's mother was a comely woman of that comfortable domestic sort known as motherly; she raised one's opinion of human nature even by the way in which she sat down. The prevailing tone seemed refined, Vane thought. No more bad taste was visible than is unavoidable in a country where the head of a family dies in a finer house than the one he was born in. The women were charming in dress, and face and figure; but their voices were disagreeable, and they seemed to him a little brusque. In fact, the men, though rather awkward, seemed to have more social importance, if not better breeding.