Nevertheless she seemed to
recover her spirits enough to talk volubly of the beautiful scenery
she had discovered in her late perilous abandonment in the wilds of the
Coast Range; to aver her intention to visit it again; to speak of it in
a severely practical way as offering a far better site for the cottages
of the young married couples just beginning life than the outskirts of
towns or the bleak sand hills of San Francisco; and thence by graceful
degrees into a dissertation upon popular fallacies in regard to hasty
marriages, and the mistaken idea of some parents in not accepting the
inevitable and making the best of it. She still found time to enter
into an appreciative and exhaustive criticism upon the literature and
journalistic enterprise of the Pacific Coast with the proprietor of the
"Pioneer," and to cause that gentleman to declare that whatever people
might say about rich and fashionable Eastern women, that Mrs. Ashwood's
head was about as level as it was pretty.
The next morning found her more thoughtful and subdued, and when her
brother came upon her sitting on the veranda, while the party were
preparing to return, she was reading a newspaper slip that she had taken
from her porte-monnaie, with a face that was partly shadowed.
"What have you struck there, Conny?" said her brother gayly. "It looks
too serious for a recipe."
"Something I should like you to read some time, Jack," she said, lifting
her lashes with a slight timidity, "if you would take the trouble.
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