a rain-gust.  The Baroness, since the beginning of that episode in her career of which a slight sketch has been attempted in these pages, had had many moments of irritation.  But to-day her irritation had a peculiar keenness; it appeared to feed upon itself.  It urged her to do something; but it suggested no particularly profitable line of action.  If she could have done something at the moment, on the spot, she would have stepped upon a European steamer and turned her back, with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying failure, her visit to her American relations.  It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest distinction for which allowance had been made in American institutions.  Her irritation came, at bottom, from the sense, which, always present, had suddenly grown acute, that the social soil on this big, vague continent was somehow not adapted for growing those plants whose fragrance she especially inclined to inhale and by which she liked to see herself surrounded—­a species of vegetation for which she carried a collection of seedlings, as we may say, in her pocket.  She found her chief happiness in the sense of exerting a certain power and making a certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock when he had counted upon a clean firm beach.  Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable.  “Surely je n’en suis pas la,” she said to herself, “that I let it make me uncomfortable that a Mr. Robert Acton should n’t honor me with a visit!” Yet she was vexed that he had not come; and she was vexed at her vexation.

Her brother, at least, came in, stamping in the hall and shaking the wet from his coat.  In a moment he entered the room, with a glow in his cheek and half-a-dozen rain-drops glistening on his mustache.  “Ah, you have a fire,” he said.

“Les beaux jours sont passes,” replied the Baroness.

“Never, never!  They have only begun,” Felix declared, planting himself before the hearth.  He turned his back to the fire, placed his hands behind him, extended his legs and looked away through the window with an expression of face which seemed to denote the perception of rose-color even in the tints of a wet Sunday.

His sister, from her chair, looked up at him, watching him; and what she saw in his face was not grateful to her present mood.  She was puzzled by many things, but her brother’s disposition was a frequent source of wonder to her.  I say frequent and not constant, for there were long periods during which she gave her attention to other problems.  Sometimes she had said to herself that his happy temper, his eternal gayety, was an affectation, a pose; but she was vaguely conscious that during the present summer he had been a highly successful comedian.  They