Eugene carried home with him not only a curiously¹ deepened feeling for Angela, due to their altered and more intimate relationship, but moreover a growing respect for her family. Old Jotham was so impressive a figure of a man; his wife so kindly² and earnest. Their attitude toward their children and to each other was so sound, and their whole relationship to society so respectable. Another observer might have been repelled³ by the narrowness and frugality⁴ of their lives. But Eugene had not known enough of luxury to be scornful of the material simplicity⁵ of such existence. Here he had found character, poetry of location, poetry of ambition, youth and happy prospects⁶. These boys, so sturdy and independent, were sure to make for themselves such places in the world as they desired. Marietta, so charming a girl, could not but make a good marriage. Samuel was doing well in his position with the railroad company; Benjamin was studying to be a lawyer and David was to be sent to West Point. He liked them for their familiar, sterling⁷ worth. And they all treated him as the destined⁸ husband of Angela. By the end of his stay he had become as much en rapport⁹ with the family as if he had known it all his life.

Before going back to New York he had stopped in Chicago, where he had seen Howe and Mathews grinding away at their old tasks, and then for a few days in Alexandria, where he found his father busy about his old affairs. Sewing machines were still being delivered by him in person, and the long roads of the country were as briskly traversed by his light machine-carrying buggy as in his earliest days. Eugene saw him now as just a little

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