All the way to Boston the transition to my old condition oppressed me. I felt a dreary disgust at the necessity of resuming relations which had no connection with the sentiment that bound me to Belem. After we were settled at the Tremont, while watching a sad waiter engaged in the ceremonial of folding napkins like fans, I discovered an intermediate tone of mind, which gave my thoughts a picturesque tinge. My romance, its regrets, and its pleasures, should be set in the frame of the wild sea and shores of Surrey. I invested our isolated house with the dignity of a stage, where the drama, which my thoughts must continually represent, could go on without interruption, and remain a secret I should have no temptation to reveal. Until after the tedious dinner, a complete rainbow of dreams spanned the arc of my brain. Mr. Somers dispersed it by asking Ben to go out on some errand. That it was a pretext, I knew by Ben's expression; therefore, when he had gone I turned to Mr. Somers an attentive face. First, he circumlocuted; second, he skirmished. I still waited for what he wished to say, without giving him any aid. He was sure, he said at last, that my visit in his family had convinced me that his children could not vary the destiny imposed upon them by their antecedents, without bringing upon _others_ lamentable consequences. "Cunning pa," I commented internally. Had I not seen the misery of unequal marriages? "As in a glass, darkly." Doubtless, he went on, I had comprehended the erratic tendency in _Ben's_ character, good and honorable as he was, but impressive and visionary. Did I think so? "Quite the contrary. Have you never perceived the method of his visions in an unvarying opposition to those antecedents you boast of?" "Well, _well_, well?" "Money, Family, Influence,--are a ding-dong bell which you must weary of, Mr. Somers--sometimes." "Ben has disappointed me; I must confess that." "My sister is eccentric. Provided she marries him, the family programme will be changed. You must lop him from the family tree." He took up a paper, bowed to me with an unvexed air, and read a column or so. "It may be absurd," and he looked over his spectacle tops, as if he had found the remark in his paper, "for parents to oppose the marriages their children choose to make, and I beg you to understand that I may _oppose_, not _resist_ Ben. You know very well," and he dropped the paper in a burst of irritation and candor, "that the devil will be to pay with Mrs. Somers, who has a right of dictation in the affair. She does not suspect it. I must say that Ben is mistaking himself again. I mean, I think so."