"Both; well, when I come to take a good look at him, Mrs. St. Clair, he looks important rather than severe, his reason is, he believes, the best part of Canada pines for annexation; comprenez vous?"
"Oh, is that what you meant," she replied, with a relieved air, when, catching her son's eye, she said, with assumed carelessness, "I do miss my men friends so much when they marry."
"He is as cold as ice," whispered Mr. Cobbe, who, though a man of birth and breeding, prides himself upon being a flirt; "he is an icicle, I wonder you waste your warmth upon him."
"Nice man," she thought, "and only the second time I've met him; he must be in love with me, too, poor fellow," and, in an undertone, she says, "That's the way all you men speak of each other, but he is only so before people."
"You had better throw him over, an Irish heart is warmer than an American," he said, in his deep tones, into her ear.
"But the poor fellow would break his heart," she whispered, her cheeks flushing; he, equally vain, continued:
"Not he, a successful speculation would console him; and I—and I would console you."
"Are you always so susceptible?" she asked, turning her pretty enamelled face around to be admired.
"No, indeed; but a man doesn't meet as pretty a woman as you every day, as your mirror must tell you."
"How you gentlemen flatter," well aware that he is admiring her pretty hand and delicate wrist, as she holds aloft a bunch of transparent grapes.