"I hope there's nobody I shall praise you to for your being humble-minded, for I can't think of an acquaintance of ours with whom it would do you the least good even if you should need the benefit. Look after your own interests, as mamma says—and we'll look after ours and let other people look after their's; they seem mostly able to!" And then as the glow of the sentiment on which she so could practise was still there in his face it virtually invited, as he could feel, another turn of her hand. "If that was a compliment to us just now about the strength of the passions in us, is it your notion that a person's modesty should figure as one of them? It puts the question, you see, of whether one would be modestly passionate or passionately modest—and I don't mind telling you, if you need the information, which you'll have to take from me."
"You give me wondrous choices," Ralph laughed, "but I hope I can get on with the information I've by this time gained. That is about you, about you," and he drew out his considering look at her—any further intention in which, however, Mrs. Midmore impatiently checked.
"If you can get on with the nonsense she talks you'll do more than I sometimes can; but I really think, you know," she added, "that you're teaching us a new language altogether and that in our own dull company we don't say half such odd things."
"It's perfectly true, mother"—and the girl kept it up at her friend; "he has made me say more of them in the last half hour, not to speak of doing 'em, the happy wretch, than in all my long life before!"
"Ah don't speak of any influence of mine," Ralph cried on as earnest a note as had yet sounded from him—"don't speak as if you didn't yourself put into my head all the wonder and the pleasure. The proportion in which I take these things from you is beyond any in which I can give others back. Do you see what I mean?"—and his earnestness appealed even to Perry, who had within a minute faced about again as for intelligence of what was said. Mrs. Midmore's appearance bore out in truth the hint that her intelligence had reached its term—a fact rendering perhaps more remarkable any fresh aspiration of her son's. It was at the worst of immediate interest to Ralph that this worthy, with a positively amused look at him, at once showed signs.
"If Molly's modest at all," he maturely observed, "she makes the point, I judge, that she's passionately so; whatever that may mean, she's welcome to the comfort. But I make the point," he said with increasing weight, "that my sister Nan, sweet Nan as you properly name her, fits on the other cap—the more becoming, as I understand it, to any young woman."
"Sweet Nan, he wants you to understand," Molly intervened on this, "is a shrinking flower of the field, whereas I'm no better than one of the bedraggled!"
"I see, I see"—our hero jumped to the vision: "you're the one infinitely talked about, as how shouldn't you be? But your sister has her virtue."
"Her virtue, Lord bless us," Mrs. Midmore took him up: "why I hope to heaven she has, with so little to speak of else; though she'll be glad, no doubt, cousin, to know that you answer for it!"
"Oh there are all kinds of virtue!" Ralph still laughed in his harmonising way—which his hostess, however, on that article, wouldn't have too much of.