Page:The Aspern Papers.djvu/269

---

shine and her native land exhibited for the occasion an atmosphere. Vague memories came back to her of her younger years, of things that had to do somehow with the blurred brightness of the late autumn in the country. She walked about, she walked irresponsibly for hours; she did not care, as she had to care in London. She met friends in the streets and turned and walked with them; and pleasures as simple as this acquired an exaggerated charm for her. She liked walking and as an American girl had indulged the taste freely; but in London she had no time but to drive—besides which there were other tiresome considerations. Macarthy came home from his office earlier and she went to meet him in Washington Square and walked up the Fifth Avenue with him in the rich afternoon. It was many years since she had been in New York and she found herself taking a kind of relapsing interest in changes and improvements. There were houses she used to know, where friends had lived in the old days and where they lived no more (no one in New York seemed to her to live where they used to live), which reminded her of incidents she had long ago forgotten, incidents that it pleased and touched her now to recall. Macarthy became very easy and sociable; he even asked her a few questions about her arrangements and habits in England and struck her (though she had never been particularly aware of it before) as having a great deal of the American humour. On one occasion he stayed away from work altogether and took her up the Hudson, on the steamer, to West Point—an excursion in which she found a peculiar charm. Every day she lunched intimately with a dozen ladies, at the house of one or other of them.