"Oh, she's not at all the sort of girl young men of their age would take to. We like her because we see what she really is; but lads of one or two and twenty want all the accessories of a young woman."
"Want what?" growled the Squire.
"Such things as becoming dress, style of manner. They would not at their age even see that she is pretty; their ideas of beauty would include colour."
"I suppose all that's very clever; but I don't understand it. All I know is, that it's a very dangerous thing to shut two young men of one and three and twenty up in a country-house like this with a girl of seventeen—choose what her gowns may be like, or her hair, or her eyes. And I told you particularly I didn't want Osborne, or either of them, indeed, to be falling in love with her. I'm very much annoyed."
Mrs. Hamley's face fell; she became a little pale.
"Shall we make arrangements for their stopping away while she is here; staying up at Cambridge, or reading with some one? going abroad for a month or two?"
"No; you've been reckoning this ever so long on their coming home. I've seen the marks of the weeks on your almanack. I'd sooner speak to Gibson, and tell him he must take his daughter away, for it's not convenient to us—"
"My dear Roger! I beg you will do no such thing. It will be so unkind; it will give the lie to all I said yesterday. Don't, please, do that. For my sake, don't speak to Mr. Gibson!"
"Well, well, don't put yourself in a flutter," for he was afraid of her becoming hysterical; "I'll speak to Osborne when he comes home, and tell him how much I should dislike anything of the kind."
"And Roger is always far too full of his natural history and comparative anatomy, and messes of that sort, to be thinking of falling in love with Venus herself. He has not the sentiment and imagination of Osborne."