"I am sorry you do not think she is happy," said Bro thoughtfully.
"There you go!" said Mrs. Manning. "I do not mean that she is exactly unhappy; but you never understand things, Bro."
"I know it; I have had so little experience," said the other. But Bro's experience, large or small, was a matter of no interest to Mrs. Manning, who rambled on about her daughter.
"The Mannings were always slow to develop, Edward used to say: I sometimes think Marion is not older now at heart than most girls of eighteen. She has always been more like the best scholar, the clear-headed girl at the top of the class, than a woman with a woman's feelings. She will be bitterly miserable if she falls in love at last, and all in vain. An old maid in love is a desperate sight."
"What do you call an old maid?" asked Bro.
"Any unmarried woman over—well, I used to say twenty-five, but Marion is that, and not much faded yet—say twenty-eight," replied Mrs. Manning, decisively, having to the full the Southern ideas on the subject.
"Then Miss Marion has three years more?"
"Yes; but, dear me! there is no one here she will look at. What I am afraid of is, that, after I am dead and gone, poor Marion, all thin and peaked (for she does not take after me in flesh), with spectacles on her nose, and little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, will be falling in love with some one who will not care for her at all. I should say a clergyman," pursued Mrs. Manning meditatively, "only Marion hates clergymen; a professor, then, or something of the kind. If I only had money enough to take her away and give her a change! She might see somebody then who would not wind his legs around his chair."
"Around his chair?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Manning, beginning on another knitting-needle. "Have you not noticed how all the young men about here twist their feet around the legs of their chairs, especially when telling a long story or at table? Sometimes it is one foot, sometimes the other, and sometimes both, which I acknowledge is awkward. What pleasure they find in it I can not imagine; I should think it would be dislocating. Young Harding, now, poor fellow! had almost no fault but that."