in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their foreign relatives.  But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth upon his liberality.  “That ’s a very nice thing to do,” he said, “giving them the little house.  You will have treated them handsomely, and, whatever happens, you will be glad of it.”  Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew he was liberal.  It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him.

“A three days’ visit at most, over there, is all I should have found possible,” Madame Munster remarked to her brother, after they had taken possession of the little white house.  “It would have been too intime—­decidedly too intime.  Breakfast, dinner, and tea en famille—­it would have been the end of the world if I could have reached the third day.”  And she made the same observation to her maid Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her confidence.  Felix declared that he would willingly spend his life in the bosom of the Wentworth family; that they were the kindest, simplest, most amiable people in the world, and that he had taken a prodigious fancy to them all.  The Baroness quite agreed with him that they were simple and kind; they were thoroughly nice people, and she liked them extremely.  The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible to be more of a lady than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little village air.  “But as for thinking them the best company in the world,” said the Baroness, “that is another thing; and as for wishing to live porte-a-porte with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep in a dormitory.”  And yet the Baroness was in high good humor; she had been very much pleased.  With her lively perception and her refined imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything that was characteristic, anything that was good of its kind.  The Wentworth household seemed to her very perfect in its kind—­wonderfully peaceful and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored freshness that had all the quietude and benevolence of what she deemed to be Quakerism, and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree of material abundance for which, in certain matters of detail, one might have looked in vain at the frugal little court of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein.  She perceived immediately that her American relatives thought and talked very little about money; and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia’s imagination.  She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or Gertrude should ask their father for a very considerable sum he would at once place it in their hands; and this made a still greater impression.  The greatest impression of all, perhaps, was made by another rapid induction.  The Baroness had an immediate conviction that Robert Acton would put his hand into his pocket every day