LONGSTAFF'S MARRIAGE
Forty years ago that traditional and anecdotical liberty of young American women, which is notoriously the envy of their foreign sisters, was not so firmly established as at the present hour; yet it was sufficiently recognized to make it no scandal that so pretty a girl as Diana Belfield should start for the grand tour of Europe under no more imposing protection than that of her cousin and intimate friend, Miss Agatha Gosling. She had, from the European point of view, beauty enough to make her enterprise perilous—the beauty foreshadowed in her name, which might have been given her in prevision of her tall, light figure, her nobly poised head, weighted with a coronal of auburn braids, her frank quick glance and her rapid gliding step. She used often to walk about with a big dog who had the habit of bounding at her side and tossing his head against her outstretched hand; and she had, moreover, a trick of carrying her long
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