to ask himself whether Charlotte and Gertrude, and Lizzie Acton, were in
the right light; they were always in the right light. He liked everything about
them: he was, for instance, not at all above liking the fact that they had very
slender feet and high insteps. He liked their pretty noses; he liked their
surprised eyes and their hesitating, not at all positive way of speaking; he
liked so much knowing that he was perfectly at liberty to be alone for hours,
anywhere, with either of them; that preference for one to the other, as a
companion of solitude, remained a minor affair. Charlotte Wentworth's sweetly
severe features were as agreeable as Lizzie Acton's wonderfully expressive blue
eyes; and Gertrude's air of being always ready to walk about and listen was as
charming as anything else, especially as she walked very gracefully. After a
while Felix began to distinguish; but even then he would often wish, suddenly,
that they were not all so sad. Even Lizzie Acton, in spite of her fine little
chatter and laughter, appeared sad. Even Clifford Wentworth, who had extreme
youth in his favor, and kept a buggy with enormous wheels and a little sorrel
mare with the prettiest legs in the world - even this fortunate lad was apt to
have an averted, uncomfortable glance, and to edge away from you at times, in
the manner of a person with a bad conscience. The only person in the circle with
no sense of oppression of any kind was, to Felix's perception, Robert Acton.
    It might perhaps have been feared that after the completion of those
graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame Münster
would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities of ennui. But as
yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a restless soul, and she
projected her restlessness, as it may be said, into any situation that lay
before her. Up to a certain point her restlessness might be counted upon to
entertain her. She was always expecting something to happen, and, until it was
disappointed, expectancy itself was a delicate pleasure. What the Baroness
expected just now it would take some ingenuity to set forth; it is enough that
while she looked about her she found something to occupy her imagination. She
assured herself that she was enchanted with her new relatives; she professed to
herself that, like her brother, she felt it a sacred satisfaction to have found
a family. It is certain that she enjoyed to the utmost the gentleness of her
kinsfolk's deference. She had, first and last,