to the way Charlotte was going on with the young men whom she met and
frankly asked to call upon her without knowing anything about them; you
could not do that in New York, he said.

But by this time New York had gone to Mrs. Kenton's head, too, and she
was less fitted to deal with Lottie than at home. Whether she had
succeeded or not in helping Ellen take her mind off herself, she had
certainly freed her own from introspection in a dream of things which had
seemed impossible before. She was in that moment of a woman's life which
has a certain pathos for the intelligent witness, when, having reared her
children and outgrown the more incessant cares of her motherhood, she
sometimes reverts to her girlish impulses and ideals, and confronts the
remaining opportunities of life with a joyful hope unknown to our heavier
and sullener sex in its later years. It is this peculiar power of
rejuvenescence which perhaps makes so many women outlive their husbands,
who at the same age regard this world as an accomplished fact. Mrs.
Kenton had kept up their reading long after Kenton found himself too busy
or too tired for it; and when he came from his office at night and fell
asleep over the book she wished him to hear, she continued it herself,
and told him about it. When Ellen began to show the same taste, they
read together, and the mother was not jealous when the father betrayed
that he was much prouder of his daughter's culture than his wife's. She
had her own misgivings that she was not so modern as Ellen, and she
accepted her judgment in the case of some authors whom she did not like
so well.

She now went about not only to all the places where she could make
Ellen's amusement serve as an excuse, but to others when she could not
coax or compel the melancholy girl. She was as constant at matinees of
one kind as Boyne at another sort; she went to the exhibitions of