"If so the clown might as well spare the courtier," not meaning the rebuke which his words implied.
"Ah—h,—but the clown will not spare the courtier, Mr. Glascock. I understand the gibe, and I tell you that the courtier shall be spared no longer;—because he is useless. He shall be cut down together with the withered grasses and thrown into the oven, and there shall be an end of him." Then she turned round to appeal to an American gentleman who had joined them, and Mr. Glascock made his escape. "I hold it to be the holiest duty which I owe to my country never to spare one of them when I meet him."
"They are all very well in their way," said the American gentleman.
"Down with them, down with them!" exclaimed the poetess, with a beautiful enthusiasm. In the meantime Mr. Glascock had made up his mind that he could not dare to ask Caroline Spalding to be his wife. There were certain forms of the American female so dreadful that no wise man would wilfully come in contact with them. Miss Petrie's ferocity was distressing to him, but her eloquence and enthusiasm were worse even than her ferocity. The personal incivility of which she had been guilty in calling him a withered grass was distasteful to him, as being opposed to his ideas of the customs of society; but what would be his fate if his wife's chosen friend should be for ever dinning her denunciation of withered grasses into his ear?
He was still thinking of all this when he was accosted by Mrs. Spalding. "Are you going to dear Lady Banbury's to-morrow?" she asked. Lady Banbury was the wife of the English Minister.
"I suppose I shall be there in the course of the evening."
"How very nice she is; is she not? I do like Lady Banbury;—so soft, and gentle, and kind."
"One of the pleasantest old ladies I know," said Mr. Glascock.
"It does not strike you so much as it does me," said Mrs. Spalding, with one of her sweetest smiles. "The truth is, we all value what we have not got. There are no Lady Banburys in our country, and therefore we think the more of them when we meet them here. She is talking of going to Rome for the Carnival, and has asked Caroline to go with her. I am so pleased to find that my dear girl is such a favourite."
Mr. Glascock immediately told himself that he saw the hook. If he were to be fished for by this American aunt as he had been fished for by English mothers, all his pleasure in the society of Caroline Spalding would be at once over. It would be too much, indeed, if in this American household he were to find the old vices of an aristocracy superadded to young republican sins! Nevertheless Lady Banbury was, as he knew well, a person whose opinion about young people was supposed to be very good. She noticed those only who were worthy of notice; and to have been taken by the hand by Lady Banbury was acknowledged to be a passport into good society. If Caroline Spalding was in truth going to Rome with Lady Banbury, that fact was in itself a great confirmation of Mr. Glascock's good opinion of her. Mrs. Spalding had perhaps understood this; but had not understood that having just hinted that it was so, she should have abstained from saying a word more about her dear girl. Clever and well-practised must, indeed, be the hand of the fisherwoman in matrimonial waters who is able to throw her fly without showing any glimpse of the hook to the fish for whom she angles. Poor Mrs. Spalding, though with kindly instincts towards her niece she did on this occasion make some slight attempt at angling, was innocent of any concerted plan. It seemed to her to be so natural to say a good word in praise of her niece to the man whom she believed to be in love with her niece.