“Well, I give you till forty,” said Cecilia.  “It ’s only a word to the wise, a notification that you are expected not to run your course without having done something handsome for your fellow-men.”

Nine o’clock sounded, and Bessie, with each stroke, courted a closer embrace.  But a single winged word from her mother overleaped her successive intrenchments.  She turned and kissed her cousin, and deposited an irrepressible tear on his moustache.  Then she went and said her prayers to her mother:  it was evident she was being admirably brought up.  Rowland, with the permission of his hostess, lighted a cigar and puffed it awhile in silence.  Cecilia’s interest in his career seemed very agreeable.  That Mallet was without vanity I by no means intend to affirm; but there had been times when, seeing him accept, hardly less deferentially, advice even more peremptory than the widow’s, you might have asked yourself what had become of his vanity.  Now, in the sweet-smelling starlight, he felt gently wooed to egotism.  There was a project connected with his going abroad which it was on his tongue’s end to communicate.  It had no relation to hospitals or dormitories, and yet it would have sounded very generous.  But it was not because it would have sounded generous that poor Mallet at last puffed it away in the fumes of his cigar.  Useful though it might be, it expressed most imperfectly the young man’s own personal conception of usefulness.  He was extremely fond of all the arts, and he had an almost passionate enjoyment of pictures.  He had seen many, and he judged them sagaciously.  It had occurred to him some time before that it would be the work of a good citizen to go abroad and with all expedition and secrecy purchase certain valuable specimens of the Dutch and Italian schools as to which he had received private proposals, and then present his treasures out of hand to an American city, not unknown to aesthetic fame, in which at that time there prevailed a good deal of fruitless aspiration toward an art-museum.  He had seen himself in imagination, more than once, in some mouldy old saloon of a Florentine palace, turning toward the deep embrasure of the window some scarcely-faded Ghirlandaio or Botticelli, while a host in reduced circumstances pointed out the lovely drawing of a hand.  But he imparted none of these visions to Cecilia, and he suddenly swept them away with the declaration that he was of course an idle, useless creature, and that he would probably be even more so in Europe than at home.  “The only thing is,” he said, “that there I shall seem to be doing something.  I shall be better entertained, and shall be therefore, I suppose, in a better humor with life.  You may say that that is just the humor a useless man should keep out of.  He should cultivate discontentment.  I did a good many things when I was in Europe before, but I did not spend a winter in Rome.  Every one assures me that this is a peculiar refinement of bliss; most