the disagreements were very much the same.  She found herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was very curious, but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one would be jostled.  The Baroness had never seen so many people walking about before; she had never been so mixed up with people she did not know.  But little by little she felt that this fair was a more serious undertaking.  She went with her brother into a large public garden, which seemed very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no carriages.  The afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid grass and the slender tree-boles were gilded by the level sunbeams—­gilded as with gold that was fresh from the mine.  It was the hour at which ladies should come out for an airing and roll past a hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols askance.  Here, however, Eugenia observed no indications of this custom, the absence of which was more anomalous as there was a charming avenue of remarkably graceful, arching elms in the most convenient contiguity to a large, cheerful street, in which, evidently, among the more prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, a great deal of pedestrianism went forward.  Our friends passed out into this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed a great many more pretty girls and called his sister’s attention to them.  This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for the Baroness had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.

“I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that,” said Felix.

The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said.  “They are very pretty,” she said, “but they are mere little girls.  Where are the women—­the women of thirty?”

“Of thirty-three, do you mean?” her brother was going to ask; for he understood often both what she said and what she did not say.  But he only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who had come to seek her fortune, reflected that it would certainly be well for her if the persons against whom she might need to measure herself should all be mere little girls.  The sunset was superb; they stopped to look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous mixture of colors.  The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood there she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a distinguished, strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street corner in the French tongue, could not be an object of indifference.  Eugenia’s spirits rose.  She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gayety.  If she had come to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to find.  There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the passers of a certain natural facility in things.