it a very nice place.  It had a mixture of the homely and the liberal, and though it was almost a museum, the large, little-used rooms were as fresh and clean as a well-kept dairy.  Lizzie Acton told her that she dusted all the pagodas and other curiosities every day with her own hands; and the Baroness answered that she was evidently a household fairy.  Lizzie had not at all the look of a young lady who dusted things; she wore such pretty dresses and had such delicate fingers that it was difficult to imagine her immersed in sordid cares.  She came to meet Madame M; auunster on her arrival, but she said nothing, or almost nothing, and the Baroness again reflected—­she had had occasion to do so before—­that American girls had no manners.  She disliked this little American girl, and she was quite prepared to learn that she had failed to commend herself to Miss Acton.  Lizzie struck her as positive and explicit almost to pertness; and the idea of her combining the apparent incongruities of a taste for housework and the wearing of fresh, Parisian-looking dresses suggested the possession of a dangerous energy.  It was a source of irritation to the Baroness that in this country it should seem to matter whether a little girl were a trifle less or a trifle more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been conscious of no moral pressure as regards the appreciation of diminutive virgins.  It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie’s pertness that she very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother’s hands.  Acton talked a great deal about his chinoiseries; he knew a good deal about porcelain and bric-a-brac.  The Baroness, in her progress through the house, made, as it were, a great many stations.  She sat down everywhere, confessed to being a little tired, and asked about the various objects with a curious mixture of alertness and inattention.  If there had been any one to say it to she would have declared that she was positively in love with her host; but she could hardly make this declaration—­even in the strictest confidence—­to Acton himself.  It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the charm of unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keenness with which she was capable of feeling things, that he had a disposition without any edges; that even his humorous irony always expanded toward the point.  One’s impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally an inconvenience.  One could trust him, at any rate, round all the corners of the world; and, withal, he was not absolutely simple, which would have been excess; he was only relatively simple, which was quite enough for the Baroness.