She blushed and was pleased, for it evidently was not an unmeaning compliment.
"Mr. Hazlewood's very clever," she said the next day; "and his tastes are so cultivated and refined. He is very different from the usual run of young men." (When a girl begins to think a man different from the "usual run," you may be sure she herself is off the common track.) "There's something very manly in all his sentiments, independent and high-toned. He cannot be engaged to Mary Morton, for I alluded to the report, and he seemed quite amused at the idea. I can see he thinks her very silly, which she is, though pretty—though he was two gentlemanly to say so."
"How, then, did you find out that he thought so," asked George, smiling.
"Oh, from one or two little things. We were speaking of a German poem that I was trying to get the other day, and he said he had it, but had lent it to Miss Morton. 'However,' he added, with a peculiar smile, 'he did not believe she wanted to read it, and at any rate, he would bring it to me as soon as she returned it. He doubted whether she was much of a German reader.' But it was more the smile and the manner in which he said it, than the words, that made me think he had no very high opinion of her literary tastes."
"He may not like her any the less for that," said George, carelessly. "I think your clever literary men rarely do value a woman less for her ignorance."
But there was an expression in Angila's pretty face that seemed to contradict this assertion; for, like most pretty women, the was vainer of her talents than her beauty—and she thought Hazlewood had been quite struck by some of her criticisms the night before.
However this might be, the intimacy seemed to progress at a wonderful rate. He called and brought her books; and they had a world to say every time they met, which, whether by accident or design, was now beginning to be very often.
"You knew old Mr. Hazlewood, mamma, did not you?" said Angila. "And who did you say Mrs. Hazlewood was?" And now she listened very differently from the last time that her mother had launched forth on the topic of old times and friends. Angila was wonderfully interested in all the history of the whole race, for Mrs. Mervale began with the great grandfathers, maternal and paternal; and she kept the thread of the story with surprising distinctness, and made out the family pedigree with amazing correctness.
"Then they are an excellent family, mamma," she said.
"To be sure they are," replied Mrs. Mervale, "one of the oldest and best in the city."