Meanwhile, Morton made the best of a six weeks' reprieve; and hampered as he was by the injunction of secrecy, and the precautions which it demanded, he crowded the short interval with half a lifetime of mixed pleasure and pain, expectation and anxiety. It was past but too quickly; in three days more he must set sail. Walking the street in a rueful mood, he met his classmate, Chester, who, having made the tour of Europe, had lost his obsolete ways, and grown backward into a man of the present world. "Good morning, Morton. Making calls?--I see it by your face." "Yes; it's a thing that must be done sometimes." "_Pour prendre conge_, I suppose. I hear you are off very soon." "The day after to-morrow." "You couldn't do a wiser thing. When a man finds himself in a scrape, he had better get out of it as soon as possible; therefore, if he finds himself born in America, he had better forswear his country." "Patriotic sentiments those." "I can't answer for the patriotism; but they are the sentiments of a true son of the Pilgrim Fathers, who renounced their country because they couldn't stand it, and came over here. I mean to follow their example, and go back again. They fled--so the story goes--from persecution. I mean to fly from persecution too,--the persecution of a social atmosphere that I find hostile to my constitution, and a climate not fit for a reasonable being to live in." "I don't know why you should be so fierce against the climate. By your look, you seem to thrive in it." "The bodily man thrives passably well. It's the immortal part that suffers. Fierce! why, the climate makes me fierce. Who can be a philosopher in such a climate?--or a poet?--or an artist?--any thing but a steam engine? It is a perpetual spur, an unremitting goad. Nobody is happy in it except the men who ride on locomotives and conduct express trains,--always on the move. O, so you go in here, do you?" "Yes, to see Mrs. Primrose. Will you come too?" "No, thank you," replied Chester, walking away, with a comical look. Morton rang the door bell, and found Mrs. Primrose at home. There was a book on the table. He took it up. It was a novel, lately published. Morton praised it. Mrs. Primrose dissented, with great emphasis. "You are severe upon the book." "Not more so than it deserves," replied Mrs. Primrose; "it is too coarse to be permitted for a moment." "And yet the moral tone seems good enough." "I do not blame the morality so much as the bad taste. It is full of slang dialogue, and was certainly written by a very unrefined person." "It makes its characters speak as such people speak in real life." "It is not merely that," said Mrs. Primrose, slightly pursing her mouth; "it contains, besides, expressions absolutely reprehensible." "One does not admire its good taste; but a little blunt Saxon never did much harm." "No daughter of mine shall read it," said Mrs. Primrose, with gravity.