"And witty, as well! You must have been associating with Dr. C——n, lately."
"So you can't give me credit for a little originality, because my facetious vein is new to you. Now, do your old friend justice, and believe even in his puns; if not pungent, he is self-sustaining and independent; but, remember, I count on you absolutely, next week. One trunk apiece and no bandboxes or baskets. A green-silk travelling-bonnet and pongee habit. This is my uniform, for my female guard. Carry Grey knows my whims, and will observe them. By-the-by, you will like my niece."
We made a delightful tour, which occupied the whole month of August, and I came back refreshed, soul and body; as for Carry Grey, she revived, like a plant that had been newly tended and watered after long neglect. For the poor girl had been making a slave of herself for two years in her widowed brother's household, consisting of many little children, and needed repose from her multifarious duties.
He was going to marry again soon, she told me, and then she hoped to feel at liberty to fulfill her own engagement of five years' standing. Carry Grey was quite this many years over twenty-one, and was going to emigrate with her husband to Missouri, and to settle in the thriving young town of St. Louis, fast growing up then into a city. He was to have a church there, and they might be so happy, she thought, if God only smiled upon them! But all depended upon that.
It was a wholesome lesson to my morbid discontent and pride to hear what trials she had surmounted already, and how many more she was ready to encounter.
She had once been engaged to a very brilliant young man, she told me, but he was dissipated and careless of her feelings, and she let him go; since that he had drifted fast to destruction, and sometimes she reproached herself for not having held to him through thick and thin. It was just possible she might have saved him, she thought, but her friends had persuaded her that he would only drag her down, and so she broke with him forever.
"Did he love you?" I asked, eagerly. "Were you sure that he was not perfidious?"
"Oh, I believe he was true to me—however false to himself."
"Then you were wrong," I said. "Wrong, believe me. Carry Grey! A woman should bear every thing but infidelity of heart for the man she loves—every thing!"
"I am sorry to hear you say so," she replied, somewhat coldly. "There is a great deal more than blind affection needful for a woman's happiness, Miss Monfort—so experience tells us. What I mean is, perhaps he might have reformed had I not broken with him; but it was the merest chance—one too feeble to depend on; and I did wisely to discard him, I am convinced."