“Hem! very pretty treatment—very pretty, indeed!”
While her husband, throwing himself into the seat she had just occupied upon the sofa, very coolly knocked his heels upon the unfortunate footstool. At length the lady paused in her walk, and turning to her husband, said,
“My dear,” (and when Mrs. Hazleton said “my dear,” it was no idle word,) “I think you misjudge my motives entirely for what I have said. It is only for the good of your dear niece, for of course she must be very dear to you, and no doubt she is a very sweet girl, that I have raised any objections to her becoming a member of our happy family—no doubt, my love, she would prove a great acquisition—but—hem—but I think I have heard you say your sister, our sister Churchill, was in rather limited circumstances, and has been obliged to use great economy in bringing up her family. Now I ask you, my dear, if—if—we should not be doing wrong, very wrong, to vitiate the simple, happy tastes of Alice, and render dull and uncongenial the home of contentment in which she has ever so peacefully dwelt? This surely would be the case were we to introduce her into the gay world. So perfectly unsophisticated as she is, she would the more easily be led astray by the frivolities of fashionable life. Would it not be better for her, then, better for her dear mother, that this visit should not take place?”
“No, I tell you no!—she shall come, she shall go everywhere, she shall see every thing the city has to boast.”
“That can easily be done, love, in a few days,” replied the plausible lady. “Some pleasant morning you can go with her to the Museum, and Girard College, and the Water-Works. When I spoke of her going out, I meant to parties—”
“And I mean to parties, and to theatres, and concerts, and—”
“You are absurd, Mr. Hazleton!”
“Go on!”
“You have no regard for my feelings!”
“Go on.”