If any one had told him that he was taking an unusual interest in the madcap girl whose acquaintance he had made in such a ludicrous manner, he would have been indignant at the imputation. He would have told you, as his family and friends said of him, that he was not susceptible, not a marrying man. In his thirty years of life he had met many beautiful and charming women, had
“Knelt at many a shrine,
Yet laid the heart on none.”
So little had he cared for women that he had not, as many men have done, created an ideal woman in his mind; but if he had done so, she would not have resembled Molly Trueheart in the least; she would have been full of gracious ease and dignity:
“A perfect creature, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel’s light.”
Molly Trueheart did not come up to this ideal at all. She was a merry, willful little maid, reminding one of April weather with her alternations from frowns to smiles, and from laughter to tears. Cecil Laurens never suspected her of a bit of sentiment until one day when he came upon her unexpectedly, and found her reading Mrs. Browning with the page open at “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.”
“You read poetry, then? I am surprised,” he said.