The young lady.  Which is different from the manner acquired by those who live a great deal in American hotels?

The mistress.  Or the Washington manner?

Herbert.  The last two are the same.

The fire-tender.  Not exactly.  You think you can always tell if a man has learned his society carriage of a dancing-master.  Well, you cannot always tell by a person’s manner whether he is a habitui of hotels or of Washington.  But these are distinct from the perfect polish and politeness of indifferentism.

IV

Daylight disenchants.  It draws one from the fireside, and dissipates the idle illusions of conversation, except under certain conditions.  Let us say that the conditions are:  a house in the country, with some forest trees near, and a few evergreens, which are Christmas-trees all winter long, fringed with snow, glistening with ice-pendants, cheerful by day and grotesque by night; a snow-storm beginning out of a dark sky, falling in a soft profusion that fills all the air, its dazzling whiteness making a light near at hand, which is quite lost in the distant darkling spaces.

If one begins to watch the swirling flakes and crystals, he soon gets an impression of infinity of resources that he can have from nothing else so powerfully, except it be from Adirondack gnats.  Nothing makes one feel at home like a great snow-storm.  Our intelligent cat will quit the fire and sit for hours in the low window, watching the falling snow with a serious and contented air.  His thoughts are his own, but he is in accord with the subtlest agencies of Nature; on such a day he is charged with enough electricity to run a telegraphic battery, if it could be utilized.  The connection between thought and electricity has not been exactly determined, but the cat is mentally very alert in certain conditions of the atmosphere.  Feasting his eyes on the beautiful out-doors does not prevent his attention to the slightest noise in the wainscot.  And the snow-storm brings content, but not stupidity, to all the rest of the household.

I can see Mandeville now, rising from his armchair and swinging his long arms as he strides to the window, and looks out and up, with, “Well, I declare!” Herbert is pretending to read Herbert Spencer’s tract on the philosophy of style but he loses much time in looking at the Young Lady, who is writing a letter, holding her portfolio in her lap,—­one of her everlasting letters to one of her fifty everlasting friends.  She is one of the female patriots who save the post-office department from being a disastrous loss to the treasury.  Herbert is thinking of the great radical difference in the two sexes, which legislation will probably never change; that leads a woman always, to write letters on her lap and a man on a table,—­a distinction which is commended to the notice of the anti-suffragists.