“Great Cæsar’s ghost! Of course I do, but that isn’t the point. The point is that I would not make the sacrifices that either of those two would do. I wish I dared ask your friend Miss Nan to sit for me. Do you believe she would? She is so picturesque.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’m afraid of her. Her eyes look right into my soul and I feel as if she would quickly discover anything ignoble there, yet I like to watch her face when she isn’t aware of it. I never saw a more expressive one.”
“Nan is fine,” said Jo emphatically. “She has the finest sort of standards. She is practical, yet romantic to her finger-tips, what they call the artistic temperament, I suppose, but it isn’t the kind that sometimes makes perfect fools of people.”
Mr. Wells laughed. “I allow that the artistic temperament is made up in several qualities of goods. So Miss Nan’s is of the first quality, I suppose.”
“It certainly is. I know how loyal a friend she can be and how she sacrifices herself every time. She has always been a buffer for Jack, the little sinner. But Jack will come out all right, or I don’t know her sister.” Then she launched forth into an account of some of Jack’s escapades which included Nan’s share in shielding the small sister, while Nan, watching from her corner, little knew that the talk related to herself, and that Jo’s praises were more to her advantage than a talk with herself would have been, for so shy was she of this new acquaintance that she was mute before him when the two were alone. Jo had been having it all her own way, she believed, and she went to bed as romantically unhappy as seventeen can be.
Yet she was as eager as any one to start on the next day’s expedition, for with the morning everything took on a rosier hue, and life was quite worth living when one had good times ahead in which figured the object of one’s romantic dreams.
“Isn’t it the most wildly delightful way to go?” said Jo. “Just like the voyageurs, and isn’t Mr. Wells a perfect dear, Nan?”
“He is a very pleasant gentleman,” returned Nan as coldly as possible.
“What an unenthusiastic person. Don’t you like him?”