The Europeans | Page 8

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.
"You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?" asked Felix.
"Not to-morrow," said the Baroness.
"Nor write to the Reigning Prince?"
"I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over
here."
"He will not believe you," said the young man. "I advise you to let him
alone."
Felix himself continued to be in high good humor. Brought up among
ancient customs and in picturesque cities, he yet found plenty of local
color in the little Puritan metropolis. That evening, after dinner, he told
his sister that he should go forth early on the morrow to look up their
cousins.
"You are very impatient," said Eugenia.
"What can be more natural," he asked, "after seeing all those pretty
girls to-day? If one's cousins are of that pattern, the sooner one knows
them the better."

"Perhaps they are not," said Eugenia. "We ought to have brought some
letters-- to some other people."
"The other people would not be our kinsfolk."
"Possibly they would be none the worse for that," the Baroness replied.
Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted. "That was not what
you said when you first proposed to me that we should come out here
and fraternize with our relatives. You said that it was the prompting of
natural affection; and when I suggested some reasons against it you
declared that the voix du sang should go before everything."
"You remember all that?" asked the Baroness.
"Vividly! I was greatly moved by it."
She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the
morning; she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother. She
apparently was going to say something, but she checked herself and
resumed her walk. Then, in a few moments, she said something
different, which had the effect of an explanation of the suppression of
her earlier thought. "You will never be anything but a child, dear
brother."
"One would suppose that you, madam," answered Felix, laughing,
"were a thousand years old."
"I am--sometimes," said the Baroness.
"I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a personage
so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you their
respects."
Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped
before her brother, laying her hand upon his arm. "They are not to
come and see me," she said. "You are not to allow that. That is not the
way I shall meet them first." And in answer to his interrogative glance

she went on. "You will go and examine, and report. You will come
back and tell me who they are and what they are; their number, gender,
their respective ages--all about them. Be sure you observe everything;
be ready to describe to me the locality, the accessories--how shall I say
it?-- the mise en scene. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under
circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them. I will present
myself--I will appear before them!" said the Baroness, this time
phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.
"And what message am I to take to them?" asked Felix, who had a
lively faith in the justness of his sister's arrangements.
She looked at him a moment--at his expression of agreeable veracity;
and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, "Say what you
please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most--natural." And
she bent her forehead for him to kiss.

CHAPTER II
The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had
suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly
leaped into summer. This was an