"No, indeed. Pardon me," said Esther. "A real fine-lady does not wear clothes that flare in people's eyes, or use importunate scents, or make a noise as she moves: she is something refined and graceful, and charming, and never obtrusive."
"Oh, yes," said Felix, contemptuously. "And she reads Byron also, and admires Childe Harold—gentlemen of unspeakable woes, who employ a hairdresser, and look seriously at themselves in the glass."
Esther reddened, and gave a little toss. Felix went on triumphantly. "A fine-lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs, and small notions, about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest. Ask your father what those old persecuted emigrant Puritans would have done with fine-lady wives and daughters."
"Oh, there is no danger of such mésalliances," said Esther. "Men who are unpleasant companions and make frights of themselves, are sure to get wives tasteless enough to suit them."
"Esther, my dear," said Mr. Lyon, "let not your playfulness betray you into disrespect toward those venerable pilgrims. They struggled and endured in order to cherish and plant anew the seeds of a scriptural doctrine and of a pure discipline."
"Yes, I know," said Esther, hastily, dreading a discourse on the pilgrim fathers.
"Oh, they were an ugly lot!" Felix burst in, making Mr. Lyon start. "Miss Medora wouldn't have minded if they had all been put into the pillory and lost their ears. She would have said, 'Their ears did stick out so.' I shouldn't wonder if that's a bust of one of them." Here Felix, with sudden keenness of observation, nodded at the black bust with the gauze over its colored face.
"No," said Mr. Lyon, "that is the eminent George Whitfield, who, you well know, had a gift of oratory as of one on whom the tongue of flame had rested visibly. But Providence—doubtless for wise ends in relation to the inner man, for I would not enquire too closely into minutiæ which carry too many plausible interpretations for any one of them to be stable—Providence, I say, ordained that the good man should squint; and my daughter has not yet learned to bear with his infirmity."
"She has put a veil over it. Suppose you had squinted yourself?" said Felix, looking at Esther.
"Then, doubtless, you could have been more polite to me, Mr. Holt," said Esther, rising and placing herself at her work-table. "You seem to prefer what is unusual and ugly."