"Is that gentleman your father, Mr. Halford?" said Mary, simply. "I think he is a very handsome old man; that silvery white hair always looks to me beautiful when accompanied with dark eyebrows and eyes."
"My father would feel extremely flattered if he heard your opinion of him, Miss Armstrong," said Henry Halford.
"I am not flattering," replied Mary, "I am only giving my opinion, and you have not told me the name of that gentleman opposite. He looks clever."
"Why, really, Miss Armstrong, I shall begin to be afraid of your opinion about myself if you are so quick at reading character. That gentleman is Professor Logan, whose address at the Royal Society has made such a stir in the scientific world."
"Oh, I am so glad to meet him!" she exclaimed. "I know he must be clever because papa is talking to him so earnestly, and I read his address at the Royal Society in the Times."
"Did you, indeed, Miss Armstrong?" said Henry, in a tone of surprise.
"Certainly I did, and with very great interest. Is there anything very wonderful in that, Mr. Halford?"
Henry Halford hesitated to reply; he looked earnestly at the young lady who could read an address on the most abstruse sciences with "great interest." He had heard young ladies spoken of rather contemptibly as "pedants" and "blue-stockings." Was this gentle, simple-speaking girl by his side one of these? Or if not, did she belong to the frivolous, half-educated young ladies, who think of nothing but dress, or lovers, or husbands in futuro? Although Mary had spoken of him as unused to ladies' society with some truth, yet he had seen and heard enough to judge of them as belonging to a sex inferior in strength both mentally and physically, and in those days of which we write his judgment was not far wrong.
"I will put a few questions to this young lady who expresses her interest in abstruse subjects," he said to himself. "Perhaps after all it is merely a smattering of knowledge which she possesses, and a wish to be thought a 'blue.' Are you fond of scientific subjects, Miss Armstrong?" he asked, with something akin to satire in the tone of his voice.
But Mary Armstrong did not detect it; she replied unaffectedly—