I didn't propose coming this way."
"I know it, dear. I was only asking," said Isabel, meekly. "But I should
think you'd have generosity enough to take a little of the blame, when I
wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you."
This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when
Basil made his first visit to Niagara, he had approached from the west by
way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existed
before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his
past, was resolved to draw near the great cataract by no other route.
She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his
hard-heartedness. The sigh touched him, and he suggested a carriage-ride
through the city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had
been thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was
taken by surprise. "If ever we leave Boston," she said, "we will not live
at Rochester, as I thought last night; we'll come to Buffalo." She found
that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the
ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious freshness
breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at
last, with no line between sharper than that which divides drowsing from
dreaming.
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