It would seem that there could not be much sympathy between natures so opposed, persons who looked at life from such different points of view, but undeniably Carmen had a certain attraction for Margaret.  The New Englander, whose climate is at once his enemy and his tonic, always longs for the tropics, which to him are a region of romance, as Italy is to the German.  In his nature, also, there is something easily awakened to the allurements of a sensuous existence, and to a desire for a freer experience of life than custom has allowed him.  Carmen, who showed to Margaret only her best side—­she would have been wise to exhibit no other to Henderson, but women of her nature are apt to cheapen themselves with men—­seemed an embodiment of that graceful gayety and fascinating worldliness which make the world agreeable.

One morning, a few days after the Indian function, Margaret was alone in her own cozy sitting-room.  Nothing was wanting that luxury could suggest to make it in harmony with a beautiful woman, nothing that did not flatter and please, or nurse, perhaps, a personal sense of beauty, and impart that glow of satisfaction which comes when the senses are adroitly ministered to.  Margaret had been in a mood that morning to pay extreme attention to her toilet.  The result was the perfection of simplicity, of freshness, of maiden purity, enhanced by the touch of art.  As she surveyed herself in the pier-glass, and noted the refined lines of the morning-gown which draped but did not conceal the more exquisite lines of her figure, and adjusted a rose in her bosom, she did not feel like a Puritan, and, although she may not have noted the fact, she did not look like one.  It was not a look of vanity that she threw into the mirror, or of special self-consciousness; in her toilet she had obeyed only her instinct (that infallible guide in a woman of refinement), and if she was conscious of any emotion, it was of the stirring within her of the deepest womanly nature.

In fact, she was restless.  She flung herself into an easy-chair before the fire, and took up a novel.  It was a novel with a religious problem.  In vain she tried to be interested in it.  At home she would have absorbed it eagerly; they would have discussed it; the doubts and suggestions in it would have assumed the deepest personal importance.  It might have made an era in her thoughtful country life.  Here it did not so appeal to her; it seemed unreal and shadowy in a life that had so much more of action than of reflection in it.  It was a life fascinating and exciting, and profoundly unsatisfactory.  Yet, after all, it was more really life than that placid vegetation in the country.  She felt that in the whirl of only a few days of it—­operas, receptions, teas, readings, dances, dinners, where everybody sparkled with a bewildering brilliancy, and yet from which one brought away nothing but a sense of strain; such gallantry, such compliments, such an easy tossing about of every topic under heaven;