"I don't agree with you, Chrissy," she said. "He seems to me VERY
MUCH of a gentleman!"
She did not venture to say all she felt, not choosing to be at absolute variance, and the threatened quarrel blew over like a shower in spring.
But some sort of impression remained from the words of Ian on the mind of Mercy, for the next morning she read a chapter in the book of Genesis, and said a prayer her mother had taught her.
CHAPTER XII.
AMONG THE HILLS.
When Mr. and Mrs. Palmer reached Inverness, they found they could spend a few days there, one way and another, to good purpose, for they had friends to visit as well as shopping to do. Mr. Palmer's affairs calling him to the south were not immediately pressing, and their sojourn extended itself to a full week of eight days, during which the girls were under no rule but their own. Their parents regarded them as perfectly to be trusted, nor were the girls themselves aware of any reason why they should not be so regarded.
The window of Christina's bedroom overlooked a part of the road between the New House and the old castle; and she could see from it all the ridge as far as the grove that concealed the cottage: if now they saw more of the young men their neighbours, and were led farther into the wilds, thickets, or pasturage of their acquaintance, I cannot say she had no hand in it.
She was depressed by a sense of failure; the boor, as she called him, was much too thick-skinned for any society but that of his bulls! and she had made no progress with the Valentine any more than with the Orson; he was better pleased with her ugly sister than with her beautiful self!
She would have given neither of tie men another thought, but that there was no one else with whom to do any of that huckster business called flirting, which to her had just harm enough in it to make it interesting to her. She was one of those who can imagine beauty nor enjoyment in a thing altogether right. She took it for granted that bad and beautiful were often one; that the pleasures of the world owed their delight to a touch, a wash, a tincture of the wicked in them. Such have so many crooked lines in themselves that they fancy nature laid down on lines of crookedness. They think the obliquity the beauty of the campanile, the blurring the charm of the sketch.
I tread on delicate ground—ground which, alas! many girls tread boldly, scattering much feather-bloom from the wings of poor Psyche, gathering for her hoards of unlovely memories, and sowing the seed of many a wish that they had done differently. They cannot pass over such ground and escape having their nature more or less vulgarized. I do not speak of anything counted wicked; it is only gambling with the precious and lovely things of the deepest human relation! If a girl with such an experience marry a man she loves—with what power of loving may be left such a one—will she not now and then remember something it would be joy to discover she had but dreamed? will she be able always to forget certain cabinets in her brain which "it would not do" to throw open to the husband who thinks her simple as well as innocent? Honesty and truth, God's essentials, are perhaps more lacking in ordinary intercourse between young men and women than anywhere else. Greed and selfishness are as busy there as in money-making and ambition. Thousands on both sides are constantly seeking more than their share—more also than they even intend to return value for. Thousands of girls have been made sad for life by the speeches of a man careful all the time to SAY nothing that amounted to a pledge! I do not forget that many a woman who would otherwise have been worth little, has for her sorrow found such consolation that she has become rich before God; these words hold nevertheless: "It must needs be that offences come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"