This very feminine conclusion, delivered loftily and with sudden reserve, left Mr. Heathcote in anything but an agreeable frame of mind, and for an hour or two made him doubt the wisdom of international marriages; but this mood passed away, and he remained a fixture at the maison Bascombe, where the very postman came to know him and generously sympathized with the malady from which he was suffering.  Nor was this the only house in which he was made very welcome.  Baltimore is one of many American cities that suffer from the vague but painful accusation of being “provincial;” but, admitting this dreadful charge, it has social, gastronomic, and other charms of its own that ought to compensate for the absence of that doubtful good, cosmopolitanism.  Mr. Heathcote certainly found no fault with it, and did not miss the population, pauperism, or other institutions of Paris, London, or Vienna.  On the contrary, he took very kindly to the pretty place, and heartily liked the people.  There was nothing oppressive or ostentatious in the attentions he received, but just the cordiality, grace, and charm of an old-established society of most refined traditions, perfect savoir-vivre, and chronic hospitality.

“You are making a Baltimorean of me, you are so awfully kind to me,” he would say, pronouncing the a in Bal as he would have done in sal; but the truth was that he had become primarily a Bascomite and only very incidentally a Baltimorean.  The city counts hundreds of such converts every year.  He was so happy and entirely content that he would have quite forgotten what it was to be bored just at this period but for certain individuals,—­a boastful, disagreeable Irishman, who fastened upon him apparently for no other reason than that he might abuse England at great length and talk of his own valor, accomplishments, and “paddygree” (as he very properly called the record that established his connection with Brian Boroo and Irish kings generally), and a lady who seemed to take the most astounding, unquenchable interest in the English nobility, as more than one lady had seemed to him to do, to his great annoyance.

“I don’t know a bit about them, I assure you,” he said to her; “but I have the ‘Peerage.’  If you would like to see that, I will send it you with pleasure.”

This only diverted her conversation into a different but equally distasteful channel,—­the great distinction and antiquity of her own family.  It really seemed as though she had a dread of Mr. Heathcote’s leaving the country with some wrong impression on this important subject and was determined that he should be put in possession of all the information she had or imagined herself to have about it.  She talked to him about it so much that the poor man was at incredible pains to keep out of her way.