"Certainly."

"Then I'll ask him to smoke with us after supper. Well, Van,
I congratulate you again that your correct and cultivated taste
enabled you to see the fatal flaw in my cousin's beauty. If you
had been bewitched by her, and had insisted on imagining (as so
many others have done) that her faultless features were the reflex
of what she is or could become in mind and character, I might have
had a good deal of trouble with you; for you are a mulish fellow when
you get a purpose in your head. I don't care how badly singed the
average run of moths become. You may see two or three fluttering
around to-night, if you care to look on, but I wish no friend of mine
to make sport, at serious cost to himself, for yonder incorrigible
coquette, if she is my cousin. But after what you have seen and now
know, you would be safe enough, even if predisposed to folly. The
little minx! but I punished her well for her spite this afternoon."

"O most prudent Ulysses! you have indeed filled my ears with wax.
I thank you all the same as if my danger were greater."

"Well, view them all with such charity as you can. I hope you were
not very much annoyed by the loss of your ride. The young lady
will not be in a hurry to play such a trick again. I'll join you
after supper in this your favorite and out-of-the-way corner."

"Was beauty ever environed within and without by such desperately
prosaic and inartistic surroundings?" mused Van Berg. "It glistens
like a lost jewel in an ash-barrel; or, more correctly, it is like
an exquisite flower that nature has perversely made the outcome