'I like brown women,' cried the widow: 'fair people always look silly.'
'But Mrs Glenmurray's eyes are hazel, and her eyelashes long and dark.'
'Hazel eyes are always bold-looking,' cried Miss Maynard.
'Not Mrs Glenmurray's; for her expression is the most pure and ingenuous that I ever saw. Some girls, indecent in their dress, and very licentious in their manner, passed us as we sat on the walk; and the comments which I made on them provoked from Mrs Glenmurray some remarks on the behaviour and dress of women; and, as she commented on the disgusting expression of vice in women, and the charm of modest dignity both in dress and manners, her own dress, manners, and expression, were such an admirable comment on her words, and she shone so brightly, if I may use the expression, in the graceful awfulness of virtue, that I gazed with delight, and somewhat of apprehension lest this fair perfection should suddenly take flight to her native skies, toward which her fine eyes were occasionally turned.'
'Bless me! if our brother is not quite poetical! This prodigy has inspired him,' replied the widow with a sneer.
'For my part, I hate prodigies,' said Miss Maynard: 'I feel myself unworthy to associate with them.'
When one woman calls another a prodigy, and expresses herself as unworthy to associate with her, it is very certain that she means to insult rather than compliment her; and in this sense Mr Maynard understood his sister's words: therefore after having listened with tolerable patience to a few more sneers at the unconscious Adeline, he was provoked to say that, ill-disposed as he found they were toward his new acquaintance, he hoped that when they became acquainted with her they would still give him reason to say, as he always had done, that he was proud of his sisters; for, in his opinion, no woman ever looked so lovely as when she was doing justice to the merits and extenuating the faults of a rival.
'A rival!' exclaimed the sisters at once:—'And, pray, what rivalship could there be in this case?'
'My remark was a general one: but since you choose to make it a particular one, I will answer to it as such,' continued Mr Maynard. 'All women are rivals in one sense—rivals for general esteem and admiration; and she only shall have my suffrage in her favour, who can point out a beauty or a merit in another woman without insinuating at the same time a counterbalancing effect.'
'But Mrs Glenmurray, it seems, has no defects!'