he dismissed the extraneous personalities from his mind almost as completely as if they had had no existence.  Few men were less embarrassed with acquaintances than he; yet he had an observant eye and a retentive memory.  When he wanted a man he rarely failed to find the right one.  In the selection and use of men he appeared to act like an intelligent and silent force, rather than as a man full of human interests and sympathies.  He rarely spoke of himself, even in the most casual way.  Most of those with whom he mingled knew merely that he was an agent of the government, and that he kept his own counsel.  His wife was to him a type of the average American woman,—­pretty, self-complacent, so nervous as to require kind, even treatment, content with feminalities, and sufficiently intelligent to talk well upon every-day affairs.  In her society he smiled at her, said “Yes,” good-humoredly, to almost everything, and found slight incentive to depart from his usual reticence.  She had learned the limits of her range, and knew that within it there was entire liberty, beyond it a will like adamant.  They got on admirably together, for she craved nothing further in the way of liberty and companionship than was accorded her, while he soon recognized that the prize carried off from other competitors could no more follow him into his realm of thought and action than she could accompany him on a campaign.  At last he had concluded philosophically that it was just as well.  He was engaged in matters that should not be interfered with or babbled about, and he could come and go without questioning.  He had occasionally thought:  “If she were such a woman as I have read of and imagined,—­if she could supplement my reason with the subtilty of intuition and the reticence which some of her sex have manifested,—­she would double my power and share my inner life, for there are few whom I can trust.  The thing is impossible, however, and so I am glad she is content.”

As for Marian, she had promised, in his view, to be but a charming repetition of her mother, with perhaps a mind of larger calibre.  She had learned more and had acquired more accomplishments, but all this resulted, possibly, from her better advantages.  Her drawing-room conversation seemed little more than the ordinary small talk of the day, fluent and piquant, while the girl herself was as undisturbed by the vital questions of the hour and of life, upon which he dwelt, as if she had been a child.  He knew that she received much attention, but it excited little thought on his part, and no surprise.  He believed that her mother was perfectly competent to look after the proprieties, and that young fellows, as had been the case with himself, would always seek pretty, well-bred girls, and take their chances as to what the women who might become their wives should prove to be.