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."