to lay siege to her hand:  about her heart he gave himself small concern.  Now, Bijou was a Western belle, and was in the habit of receiving any amount of attention.  At seventeen a famous racer and a steam-boat had already been named for her.  The local newspapers chronicled her toilets and triumphs.  Her little sitting-room was a sentimental hall of Eblis, full of shapes with hearts that were one burning coal, bright with the sacred flame.  She had a large album which she called her “him-book,” because it contained nothing but the photographs of her admirers.  She had hats, and bats, and caps, and whips, and cravats, and oars, and canes disposed about it tastefully, souvenirs of various persons, times, and places, and talked of the original owners in a way that made Ethel’s blue eyes open their widest when she came to be admitted there, that decorous young person not being used, as she frankly said, to hearing “a person of the opposite sex” called “a perfectly lovely fellow,” and his nose pronounced “a dream,” though not in the sense of its being broken or disjointed.

“Why, you wouldn’t have me call you a lovely fellow, would you?” said Bijou laughingly, as she tripped about doing the honors of her den, —­showing locks of hair (of which she had almost enough to stuff a sofa-cushion), dried bouquets of vast dimensions, little gifts she had received, verses and valentines that she thought “perfectly splendid” or “too utterly killing for anything,” and bundle after bundle of letters, —­the adorers’ letters, all of them, written from all parts of the country, in every style.  She read Ethel choice passages from them with great glee, and gave spirited sketches of her correspondents; how she had met them at Saratoga, Mt.  Desert, “and pretty much every place;” how she had danced, flirted, walked, driven, sailed, “crabbed,” read, sung, talked with them, apparently without either fear or reproach; and of their appearance, dress, character, position, prospects,—­a full, if not perfectly complete, history of her relations with them that almost made Ethel’s lower jaw drop as she listened.  There was no mention of mother, aunt, governess, or maid throughout.  Bijou had gone away from home with friends who had let her amuse herself in her own fashion; and at home she was what De Tocqueville has pronounced “the freest thing in the world,—­an American girl in her father’s house.”  Yet it was a liberty that was worlds removed from license.  Undisciplined she was, impulsive, indulged beyond all European conceptions, but, in spite of a good deal of innocent coquetry and vanity, effervescing in some foolish ways very pardonable in a motherless girl, and of which a great deal too much has been made in discussing American girls, there was never one of any nation more pure-hearted and womanly.  Her worst deviations from rigidly conventional standards were better than the best behavior of some very nice people, as Swift defines them,—­“Nice people:  people who are always thinking of and looking out for nasty things.”  Different training would have improved her, just as a hot-house rose is more perfect than the wild one; but she, too, was pink-petalled, had a heart of gold, and was full of lovely, fragrant qualities, like the English variety near her.