She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a woman with so much broiled white-fish on her plate, and such a banquet array about her; and her husband made haste to reassure her.  “You’re still demoralized, Isabel, by our sufferings at the Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings we enjoy, though I should be sorry to undervalue them.  I suspect it’s the custom to use people well at this hotel; or if we are singled out for uncommon favor, I think:  I can explain the cause.  It has been discovered by the register that we are from Boston, and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection, and homage which the name everywhere commands!

“It ’s our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and moral virtue of Boston.  This supper is not a tribute to you as a bride, but as a Bostonian.”

It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it served.  It kindled the local pride of Isabel to self-defense, and in the distraction of the effort she forgot her fears; she returned with renewed appetite to the supper, and in its excellence they both let fall their dispute,—­which ended, of course, in Basil’s abject confession that Boston was the best place in the world, and nothing but banishment could make him live elsewhere,—­and gave themselves up, as usual, to the delight of being just what and where they were.  At last, the natural course brought them to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter approached from the corner of the table at which he stood, to place the vase near them, he did not retire at once, but presently asked if they were from the West.

Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were from the East.

He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if he went further, but took heart, then, and asked, “Don’t you think this is a pretty nice hotel”—­hastily adding as a concession of the probable existence of much finer things at the East—­“for a small hotel?”

They imagined this waiter as new to his station in life, as perhaps just risen to it from some country tavern, and unable to repress his exultation in what seemed their sympathetic presence.  They were charmed to have invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his soul; it was what might have happened in Italy, only there so much naivete would have meant money; they looked at each other with rapture and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed as at a personal compliment:  “Yes, it ’s a nice hotel; one of the best I ever saw, East or West, in Europe or America.”

They rose and left the room, and were bowed out by the head-waiter.

“How perfectly idyllic!” cried Isabel.  “Is this Rochester, New York, or is it some vale of Arcady?  Let’s go out and see.”