“It is quite clear that you have both entered into a plot against me,” rejoined Freddy; “well, never mind, mea virtute me involvo: I wrap myself in a proud consciousness of my own immeasurable superiority, and despise your attacks.”
“I have read, that to begin by despising your enemy, is one of the surest methods of losing the battle,” replied Miss Saville.
“Oh! if you are going to quote history against me, I yield at once—there is nothing alarms me so much as the sight of a blue-stocking,” answered Freddy.
Miss Saville proceeded to defend herself with much vivacity against this charge, and they continued to converse in the same light strain for some time longer; Coleman, as usual, being exceedingly droll and amusing, and the young lady displaying a decided talent for delicate and playful badinage. In order to enter con spirito into this style of conversation, we must either be in the enjoyment of high health and spirits, when our light-heartedness finds a natural vent in gay raillery and sparkling repartee, or we must be suffering a sufficient degree of positive unhappiness to make us feel that a strong effort is necessary to screen our sorrow from the careless gaze of those around us. Now, though Coleman had not been far wrong in describing me as “weak, languid, and unhappy,” mine was not a positive, but a negative unhappiness, a gentle sadness, which was rather agreeable than otherwise, and towards which I was by no means disposed to use the slightest violence. I was in the mood to have shed tears with the love-sick Ophelia, or to moralise with the melancholy Jaques, but should have considered Mercutio a man of no feeling, and the clown a “very poor fool” indeed. In this frame of mind, the conversation appeared to me to have assumed such an essentially frivolous turn, that I soon ceased to take any share in it, and, turning over the leaves of a book of prints as an excuse for my silence, endeavoured to abstract my thoughts altogether from the scene around me, and employ them on some subject less dissonant to my present tone of feeling. As is usually the result in such cases, the attempt proved a dead failure, and I soon found myself speculating on the lightness and frivolity of women in general, and of Clara Saville in particular.
“How thoroughly absurd and misplaced,” thought I, as her silvery laugh rang harshly on my distempered ear, “were all my conjectures that she was unhappy, and that, in the trustful and earnest expression of those deep blue eyes, I could read the evidence of a secret grief, and a tacit appeal for sympathy to those whom her instinct taught her were worthy of her trust and confidence! Ah! well, I was young and foolish then (it was not quite a year and a half ago), and imagination found an easy dupe in me; one learns to see things in their true light as one grows older, but it is sad how the doing so robs life of all its brightest illusions.”
It did not occur to me at that moment that there was a slight injustice in accusing Truth of petty larceny in regard to a bright illusion in the present instance, as the fact (if fact it were) of proving that Miss Saville was happy instead of miserable could scarcely be reckoned among that class of offences.
“Come, Freddy,” exclaimed Mrs. Coleman, suddenly waking up to a sense of duty, out of a dangerous little nap in which she had been indulging, and which occasioned me great uneasiness, by reason of the opportunity it afforded her for the display of an alarming suicidal propensity, which threatened to leave Mr. Coleman a disconsolate widower, and Freddy motherless.
As a warning to all somnolent old ladies, it may not be amiss to enter a little more fully into detail. The attack commenced by her sitting bolt upright in her chair, with her eyes so very particularly open, that it seemed as if, in her case, Macbeth or some other wonder-worker had effectually “murdered sleep”. By slow degrees, however, her eyelids began to close; she grew less and less “wide awake,” and ere long was fast as a church; her next move was to nod complacently to the company in general, as if to demand their attention; she then oscillated gently to and fro for a few seconds to get up the steam, and concluded the performance by suddenly flinging her head back, with an insane jerk, over the rail of the chair, at the imminent risk of breaking her neck, uttering a loud snort of triumph as she did so.
Trusting the reader will pardon, and the humane society award me a medal for this long digression, I resume the thread of my narrative.
“Freddy, my dear, can't you sing us that droll Italian song your cousin Lucy taught you? I'm sure poor Miss Saville must feel quite dull and melancholy.”