their tables upon the grass, replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of kitchen stoves.  But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found a family—­sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might call by their first names.  He had never known anything more charming than the attention they paid to what he said.  It was like a large sheet of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with effective splashes of water-color.  He had never had any cousins, and he had never before found himself in contact so unrestricted with young unmarried ladies.  He was extremely fond of the society of ladies, and it was new to him that it might be enjoyed in just this manner.  At first he hardly knew what to make of his state of mind.  It seemed to him that he was in love, indiscriminately, with three girls at once.  He saw that Lizzie Acton was more brilliantly pretty than Charlotte and Gertrude; but this was scarcely a superiority.  His pleasure came from something they had in common—­a part of which was, indeed, that physical delicacy which seemed to make it proper that they should always dress in thin materials and clear colors.  But they were delicate in other ways, and it was most agreeable to him to feel that these latter delicacies were appreciable by contact, as it were.  He had known, fortunately, many virtuous gentlewomen, but it now appeared to him that in his relations with them (especially when they were unmarried) he had been looking at pictures under glass.  He perceived at present what a nuisance the glass had been—­how it perverted and interfered, how it caught the reflection of other objects and kept you walking from side to side.  He had no need 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.