It was most uncommonly kind of him, for instance, to have given them a house. Felix was positively amused at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the apple-trees--the chalet, as Madame Munster always called it--was much more sensibly his own than any domiciliary quatrieme, looking upon a court, with the rent overdue.
Felix had spent a good deal of his life in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away and the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He had never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England fields; and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses.
He had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his uncle's. The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung a rosy light over this homely privilege.
He appreciated highly the fare that was set before him.
There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass, replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of kitchen stoves.
But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found a family--sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might call by their first names. He had never known anything more charming than the attention they paid to what he said.
It was like a large sheet of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with effective splashes of water-color.
He had never had any cousins, and he had never before found himself in contact so unrestricted with young unmarried ladies.