perhaps, in some particular scion of a blue-blooded Boston
family.

The plan succeeded in part only. The companionship of her
schoolfellows, her music and art-lessons, her books (during the
limited periods allotted to serious study and reading), and,
above all, her attrition at receptions with another order of men
than that she had known in the rough, uncultured West, occupied
her mind so fully that poor Dick Lane, who was putting a thought
of Echo Allen in every blow of his pick, received only the scraps
of her attention.

Dick had few opportunities to mail a letter, and none of them for
receiving one. Unpractised in writing, his epistolary
compositions were crude in the extreme, being wholly confined to
bald statements of fact. Had he been as tender on paper as he
was in his words and accents when he kissed away her tears at
parting, her regard for him would have had fuel to feed on and
might have kindled into genuine love. As it was, she was forced
to admit that, in comparison, with the brilliant university men
with whom she conversed, Dick Lane, intellectually, was as quartz
to diamond.

On the other band, she contrasted Dick in the essential point of
manliness most favorably with the male butterflies of society
that hovered around her. What one of them was so essentially
chivalrous as the Western man; so modest, so self-sacrificing, so
brave and resolute and resourceful? Dick Lane, or Jack Payson,
for that matter, in all save the adventitious points of education
and culture was the higher type of manhood, and Jack, at least,