"And so really you don't like this Mr. Davenport?"
"Like him! Indeeed I don't. In the first place, it isn't a year yet since his wife died; and everybody was pitying him. He could hardly be kept alive, and fainted away, and had to have hot bottles at his feet, and all that. All the old ladies were rolling up their eyes; such a sighing and sympathizing for John Davenport; and now, here he is!"
"Poor man!" said Eva, "I suppose he is lonesome."
"Yes. I suppose, as Irving says, the greatest compliment he can pay to his former wife is to display an eagerness for another; but his attentions are simply disagreeable to me."
"After all, the worst crime you allege seems to be that he is too sensitive to your attractions."
"Yes; and shows it in a very silly way—making me an object of remark! He may be very nice and very worthy, and all that; but in any such relation as that he is so unpleasant to me! I can't bear him, and I'm not going to be talked or maneuvered into anything that might commit me to even consider him. I remember the trouble you had for being persuaded to let Wat Sydney dangle after you. I will not have anything of the kind. I am a decided young woman, and know my own mind."
"Well, how did you learn about Aunt Maria and Jim?"
"How? Oh, well, the next day comes Aunt Maria to talk with Mamma, who wasn't there, by the bye; Papa hates so to go out that she has got to staying at home with him. But the next day came an exaggerated picture of my triumphs to Mamma and a lecture to me on my bad behavior. The worst of all, she said, was the very marked thing of my going home with Jim; and in her heat she let out that she had spoken to him and warned him of what folks would think and say of such appearances. I was angry then, and I expressed my mind freely to Aunt Maria, and we had a downright quarrel. I said things I ought not to say, just as one always does, and—now isn't it disagreeable? Isn't it dreadful?" said Alice, with the earnestness of a young girl whose whole nature goes into her first trouble. "Nothing could be nicer and more just what a thing ought to be than my friendship with Jim. I have influence over him and I can do him good, and I enjoy his society, and the kind of easy, frank understanding that there is between us, that we can say any thing to each other; and what business is it of anybody's? It's our own affair, and no one's else."
"Certainly it is," said Eva, sympathizingly.