86
THE EUROPEANS.
evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-
shifted flower. Felix extracted entertainment from
all things, and all his faculties—his imagination,
his intelligence, his affections, his senses—had a
hand in the game. It seemed to him that Eugenia
and he had been very well treated; there was some-
thing absolutely touching in that combination of
paternal liberality and social considerateness which
marked Mr. Wentworth's deportment. It was most
uncommonly kind of him, for instance, to have given
them a house. Felix was positively amused at hav-
ing a house of his own; for the little white cottage
among the apple-trees — the chalet, as Madame
Munster always called it—was much more sensibly
his own than any domiciliary quatrième, looking
upon a court, with the rent overdue. Felix had
spent a good deal of his life in looking into courts,
with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows rest-
ing upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and
the thin smoke of a cigarette rising into an atmo-
sphere in which street-cries died away and the vibra-
tion of chimes from ancient belfries became sen-
sible. He had never known anything so infinitely
rural as these New England fields; and he took a
great fancy to all their pastoral roughness. He had
never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and
at the risk of making him seem a rather sordid ad-