The perseverance with which she walked out of Princess’s Place to fetch this baby and its nurse, and walked back with them, and walked home with them again, and continually mounted guard over them; and the perseverance with which she nursed it herself, and fed it, and played with it, and froze its young blood with airs upon the harpsichord, was extraordinary. At about this same period too, she was seized with a passion for looking at a certain bracelet; also with a passion for looking at the moon, of which she would take long observations from her chamber window. But whatever she looked at; sun, moon, stars, or bracelet; she looked no more at the Major. And the Major whistled, and stared, and wondered, and dodged about his room, and could make nothing of it.
“You’ll quite win my brother Paul’s heart, and that’s the truth, my dear,” said Mrs Chick, one day.
Miss Tox turned pale.
“He grows more like Paul every day,” said Mrs Chick.
Miss Tox returned no other reply than by taking the little Paul in her arms, and making his cockade perfectly flat and limp with her caresses.
“His mother, my dear,” said Miss Tox, “whose acquaintance I was to have made through you, does he at all resemble her?”
“Not at all,” returned Louisa
“She was—she was pretty, I believe?” faltered Miss Tox.
“Why, poor dear Fanny was interesting,” said Mrs Chick, after some judicial consideration. “Certainly interesting. She had not that air of commanding superiority which one would somehow expect, almost as a matter of course, to find in my brother’s wife; nor had she that strength and vigour of mind which such a man requires.”
Miss Tox heaved a deep sigh.