And after a while they went out.  The air had grown warm as well as brilliant; the sunshine had dried the pavements.  They walked about the streets at hazard, looking at the people and the houses, the shops and the vehicles, the blazing blue sky and the muddy crossings, the hurrying men and the slow-strolling maidens, the fresh red bricks and the bright green trees, the extraordinary mixture of smartness and shabbiness.  From one hour to another the day had grown vernal; even in the bustling streets there was an odor of earth and blossom.  Felix was immensely entertained.  He had called it a comical country, and he went about laughing at everything he saw.  You would have said that American civilization expressed itself to his sense in a tissue of capital jokes.  The jokes were certainly excellent, and the young man’s merriment was joyous and genial.  He possessed what is called the pictorial sense; and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred the same sort of attention that he would have given to the movements of a lively young person with a bright complexion.  Such attention would have been demonstrative and complimentary; and in the present case Felix might have passed for an undispirited young exile revisiting the haunts of his childhood.  He kept looking at the violent blue of the sky, at the scintillating air, at the scattered and multiplied patches of color.

“Comme c’est bariole, eh?” he said to his sister in that foreign tongue which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting occasionally to use.

“Yes, it is bariole indeed,” the Baroness answered.  “I don’t like the coloring; it hurts my eyes.”

“It shows how extremes meet,” the young man rejoined.  “Instead of coming to the West we seem to have gone to the East.  The way the sky touches the house-tops is just like Cairo; and the red and blue sign-boards patched over the face of everything remind one of Mahometan decorations.”

“The young women are not Mahometan,” said his companion.  “They can’t be said to hide their faces.  I never saw anything so bold.”

“Thank Heaven they don’t hide their faces!” cried Felix.  “Their faces are uncommonly pretty.”

“Yes, their faces are often very pretty,” said the Baroness, who was a very clever woman.  She was too clever a woman not to be capable of a great deal of just and fine observation.  She clung more closely than usual to her brother’s arm; she was not exhilarated, as he was; she said very little, but she noted a great many things and made her reflections.  She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed come to a strange country, to make her fortune.  Superficially, she was conscious of a good deal of irritation and displeasure; the Baroness was a very delicate and fastidious person.  Of old, more than once, she had gone, for entertainment’s sake and in brilliant company, to a fair in a provincial town.  It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous fair—­that the entertainment and