pictures, and got herself up in schools of painting; she frequented
galleries, public and private, and got asked to studio teas; she went to
meetings and conferences of aesthetic interest, and she paid an easy way
to parlor lectures expressive of the vague but profound ferment in
women's souls; from these her presence in intellectual clubs was a simple
and natural transition. She met and talked with interesting people, and
now and then she got introduced to literary people. Once, in a
book-store, she stood next to a gentleman leaning over the same counter,
whom a salesman addressed by the name of a popular author, and she
remained staring at him breathless till he left the place. When she
bragged of the prodigious experience at home, her husband defied her to
say how it differed from meeting the lecturers who had been their guests
in Tuskingum, and she answered that none of them compared with this
author; and, besides, a lion in his own haunts was very different from a
lion going round the country on exhibition. Kenton thought that was
pretty good, and owned that she had got him there.

He laughed at her, to the children, but all the same she believed that
she was living in an atmosphere of culture, and with every breath she was
sensible of an intellectual expansion. She found herself in the
enjoyment of so wide and varied a sympathy with interests hitherto
strange to her experience that she could not easily make people believe
she had never been to Europe. Nearly every one she met had been several
times, and took it for granted that she knew the Continent as well as
they themselves.

She denied it with increasing shame; she tried to make Kenton understand
how she felt, and she might have gone further if she had not seen how
homesick he was for Tuskingum. She did her best to coax him and scold
him into a share of the pleasure they were all beginning to have in New