Chorus of male readers, “Oh, les femmes, les femmes!”
David Dodd had by nature a healthy as well as a high mind; but the fever and ague of an absorbing passion were telling on it. Like many a great heart before his day, his heart was tossed like a ship, and went up to heaven, and down again to despair, as a girl's humor shifted, or seemed to shift, for he forgot that there is such a thing as accident, and that her sex are even more under its dominion than ours. No; whatever she did must be spontaneous, voluntary, premeditated even, and her lightest word worth weighing, her lightest action worth anxious scrutiny as to its cause.
Still he had this about him that the peevish and puny lover has not. Her bare presence was joy to him. Even when she was surrounded by other figures, he saw and felt but the one; the rest were nothings. But when she went out of his sight, some bright illusion seemed to fade into cold and dark reality. Then it fell on him like a weighty, icy hammer, that in three days he must go to sea for two years, and that he was no nearer her heart now than he was at Font Abbey. Was he even as near?
So the next afternoon he thrust in before Talboys, and put Lucy on her horse by brute force, and griped her stout little boot, which she had slyly substituted for a shoe, and touched her glossy habit, and felt a thrill of bliss unspeakable at his momentary contact with her; but she was no sooner out of sight than a hollow ache seized the poor fellow, and he hung his head and sighed.
“I say, capting,” said a voice in his ear. He looked up, and there stood Tom, the stable-boy, with both hands in his pockets. Tom was not there by his own proper movement, but was agent of Betsy, the under-housemaid.
Female servants scan the male guests pretty closely too, without seeming to do it, and judge them upon lamentably broad principles—youth, health, size, beauty, and good temper. Oh, the coarse-minded critics! Hence it befell that in their eyes, especially after the fiddle business, David was a king compared with his rivals.
“If I look at him too long, I shall eat him,” said the cook-maid.
“He is a darling,” said the upper housemaid.
Betsy aforesaid often opened a window to have a sly look at him, and on one of these occasions she inspected him from an upper story at her leisure. His manner drew her attention. She saw him mount Lucy, and eye her departing form sadly and wistfully. Betsy glowered and glowered, and hit the nail on the head, as people will do who are so absurd as to look with their own eyes, and draw their own conclusions instead of other people's. After this she took an opportunity, and said to Tom, with a satirical air, “How are you off for nags, your way?”
“Oh, we have got enough for our corn,” replied Tom, on the defensive.