ideas and stimulating ambitions.  So at least Selma thought of it, and though Boston and New York and a few other places were accepted by her as authoritative, she accepted them, as she accepted Shakespeare, as a matter of course and so far removed from her immediate outlook as almost not to count.  But Benham with its seventy-five thousand inhabitants and independent ways was a fascinating possibility.  Once established there the world seemed within her grasp, including Boston.  Might it not be that Benham, in that it was newer, was nearer to truth and more truly American than that famous city?  She was not prepared to believe this an absurdity.

At least the mental atmosphere of Westfield and even of the somewhat less solemn Wilton suggested this apotheosis of the adjacent city to be reasonable.  Westfield had stood for Selma as a society of serious though simple souls since she could first remember and had been one of them.  Not that she arrogated to her small native town any unusual qualities of soul or mind in distinction from most other American communities, but she regarded it as inferior in point of view to none, and typical of the best national characteristics.  She had probably never put into words the reasons of her confidence, but her daily consciousness was permeated with them.  To be an American meant to be more keenly alive to the responsibility of life than any other citizen of civilization, and to be an American woman meant to be something finer, cleverer, stronger, and purer than any other daughter of Eve.  Under the agreeable but sobering influence of this faith she had grown to womanhood, and the heroic deeds of the civil war had served to intensify a belief, the truth of which she had never heard questioned.  Her mission in life had promptly been recognized by her as the development of her soul along individual lines, but until the necessity for a choice had arisen she had been content to contemplate a little longer.  Now the world was before her, for she was twenty-three and singularly free from ties.  Her mother had died when she was a child.  Her father, the physician of the surrounding country, a man of engaging energy with an empirical education and a speculative habit of mind, had been the companion of her girlhood.  During the last few years since his return from the war an invalid from a wound, her care for him had left her time for little else.

No more was Babcock in haste to reach home; and after the preliminary dash from the door into the glorious night he suffered the farm-horse to pursue its favorite gait, a deliberate jog.  He knew the creature to be docile, and that he could bestow his attention on his companion without peril to her.  His own pulses were bounding.  He was conscious of having made the whirligig of time pass merrily for the company by his spirits and jolly quips, and that in her presence, and he was groping for an appropriate introduction to the avowal he had determined to make.  He would