The confidence of young Americans was notorious, and I speedily arrived at a conviction that no impulse could have been more generous than the impulse that had operated here.

I foresaw at that moment that it would make her my peculiar charge, just as circumstances had made Neil Paraday.

She would be another person to look after, so that one's honour would be concerned in guiding her straight.

These things became clearer to me later on; at the instant I had scepticism enough to observe to her, as I turned the pages of her volume, that her net had all the same caught many a big fish.

She appeared to have had fruitful access to the great ones of the earth; there were people moreover whose signatures she had presumably secured without a personal interview.