PLAIN TALK.
At last the sound of mirth and laughter ceased, and the house became quiet.
Lottie sat warming her feet at the glowing coals in her room, before retiring. A dreamy smile played upon her face, coming and going with passing thoughts, even as the firelight flickered upon it.
She was in an unusually amiable mood, for this affair with Hemstead promised richly. If he had been an ordinary and polished society-man, the flirtation would have been humdrum, like a score of others. But he was so delightfully fresh and honest, and yet so clever withal, that her eyes sparkled with anticipating mirth as she saw him in various attitudes of awkward love-making, and then dropping helplessly into the abyss of his own great, but empty heart, on learning the vainness of his passion.
"He finds me 'more interesting than some doctrines,' indeed! I'll put all his dry doctrines to rout in less than a week. I'll drive text-books and professors out of his head, and everything else (save myself) out of his heart, for a little while. But after he gets back to Michigan, the doctrines will come creeping back into their old place, and he will get comfortably over it like the rest. In the mean while, as substantial and useful results, I will have my rare bit of sport, and he will know more about the wicked world against which he is to preach. By and by he will marry a pious Western giantess, whose worst dissipation is a Sunday-school picnic, and will often petrify her soul with horror and wonder by describing that awful little pagan, Lottie Marsden.
"And a heathen I am in very truth. Where are missionaries needed more than in Fifth Avenue? They had better not come, though; for if we would not eat them, we would freeze them."
"What are you thinking about, Lottie, that you are smiling so sweetly?" asked her room-mate, Bel Parton.
"In truth, it was a sweet thought," said Lottie, her laugh awakening sudden echoes in the still house, and sounding as oddly as a bird's song at night. "I'm glad Frank Hemstead doesn't know. If he did, I should appall instead of fascinating him."
"I think your plot against him is very wrong,—wicked, indeed. He is such a sincere, good young man, that I like it less and less. I couldn't do such a thing."
"Still you can look on and enjoy the fun, and that is all you have to do. Poor Bel, you are always in need of an M. D.'s or a D. D.'s care. I have forsworn both."