“If we continue this discussion, sir, at our present rate, I opine that by the time we reach Dublin your niece will have become an angel.”
Martin dropped his head, and was silent; and although her Ladyship made two or three other efforts to revive the argument, he seemed resolved to decline the challenge, and so they rolled along the road sullen and uncommunicative.
In the second carriage were Repton and Kate Henderson,—an arrangement which the old lawyer flatteringly believed he owed to his cunning and address, but which in reality was ordained by Lady Dorothea, whose notions of rank and precedence were rigid. Although Repton's greatest tact lay in his detection of character, he felt that he could not satisfactorily affirm he had mastered the difficulty in the present case. She was not exactly like anything he had met before; her mode of thought, and even some of her expressions were so different that the old lawyer owned to himself, “It was like examining a witness through an interpreter.”
A clever talker—your man of conversational success—is rarely patient under the failure of his powers, and, not very unreasonably perhaps, very ready to ascribe the ill-success to the defects of his hearer. They had not proceeded more than half of the first post ere Repton began to feel the incipient symptoms of this discontent.
She evidently had no appreciation for bar anecdote and judicial wit; she took little interest in political events, and knew nothing of the country or its people. He tried the subject of foreign travel, but his own solitary trip to Paris and Brussels afforded but a meagre experience of continental life, and he was shrewd enough not to swim a yard out of his depth. “She must have her weak point, if I could but discover it,” said he to himself. “It is not personal vanity, that I see. She does not want to be thought clever, nor even eccentric, which is the governess failing par excellence. What then can it be?” With all his ingenuity he could not discover. She would talk, and talk well, on any theme he started, but always like one who maintained conversation through politeness and not interest; and this very feature it was which piqued the old man's vanity, and irritated his self-love.
When he spoke, she replied, and always with a sufficient semblance of interest; but if he were silent, she never opened her lips.
“And so,” said he, after a longer pause than usual, “you tell me that you really care little or nothing whither Fortune may be now conducting you.”
“To one in my station it really matters very little,” said she, calmly. “I don't suppose that the post-horses there have any strong preference for one road above another, if they be both equally level and smooth.”
“There lies the very question,” said he; “for you now admit that there may be a difference.”
“I have never found in reality,” said she, “that these differences were appreciable.”