the Baroness, much to the confusion of Charlotte, who had been on the point of proposing to come and help her put her superfluous draperies away.  But what Charlotte mistook for an almost culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very presently perceived to be the most ingenious, the most interesting, the most romantic intention.  “What is life, indeed, without curtains?” she secretly asked herself; and she appeared to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.

Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about anything—­least of all about the conditions of enjoyment.  His faculty of enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow.  His sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were in themselves a delight to him.  As they had come to him with a great deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable than appeared.  Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate.  It was not a restless, apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put Adversity off her guard, dodging and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted flower.  Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his faculties—­his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his senses—­had a hand in the game.  It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had been very well treated; there was something absolutely touching in that combination of paternal liberality and social considerateness which marked Mr. Wentworth’s deportment.  It was most uncommonly kind of him, for instance, to have given them a house.  Felix was positively amused at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the apple-trees—­the chalet, as Madame Munster always called it—­was much more sensibly his own than any domiciliary quatrieme, looking upon a court, with the rent overdue.  Felix had spent a good deal of his life in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away and the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible.  He had never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England fields; and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses.  He had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his uncle’s.  The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung a rosy light over this homely privilege.  He appreciated highly the fare that was set before him.  There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the mythological era, when they spread