"Robert Hazlewood! Oh, Angila! You are jesting," exclaimed her friend, thrown quite off her guard by astonishment.
"Yes, indeed!" replied Angila, with eager delight, attributing Augusta's surprise and incredulous tones to quite another source. "You may well be surprised, Augusta. Is it not strange that such a man—one of his superior talents—should have fallen in love with such a mad-cap as me."
Augusta could hardly believe her ears. But the truth was, that Angila had so long since forgotten her prejudice, founded on nothing, against Hazlewood, that she was not conscious now that she had ever entertained any such feelings. She was not obliged, in common phrase, to "eat her own words," for she quite forgot that she had ever uttered them. And now, with the utmost enthusiasm, she entered into all her plans and prospects—told Augusta, with the greatest interest, as if she thought the theme must be equally delightful to her friend—all her mother's long story about the old Hazlewoods, and what a "charming nice family they were," ("those pattern people that she hated so," as Augusta remembered, but all of which was buried in the happiest oblivion with Angila,) and the dear little house that was being furnished like a bijou next to Mrs. Constant's, (next to Mrs. Constant's!—one of those small houses with low ceilings! Augusta gasped;) and how many servants she was going to keep; and what a nice young girl she had engaged already as waiter.
"You mean, then, to have a woman waiter?" Augusta could not help saying.
"Oh, to be sure!" said Angila. "What should I do with a man in such a pretty little establishment as I mean to have. And then you know we must be economical—Mr. Hazlewood is a young lawyer, and I don't mean to let him slave himself to make the two ends meet. You'll see what a nice economical little housekeeper I'll be."
And, in short, Augusta found that the same bright, warm imagination that had made Angila once dream of Ossian-heroes, now endowed Robert Hazlewood with every charm she wanted, and even threw a romantic glow over a small house, low ceilings, small economies, and all but turned the woman-servant into a man. Cinderella's godmother could hardly have done more. Such is the power of love!
"Well," said Augusta, in talking it all over with her brother, "I cannot comprehend it yet; Angila, who used to be so fastidious, so critical, who expected so much in the man she was to marry!"
"She is not the first young lady who has come down from her pedestal," replied her brother, laughing.
"No, but she has not," returned Augusta, "that's the oddest part of the whole—she has only contrived somehow to raise Hazlewood on a pedestal, too. You'd think they were the only couple in the world going to be married. She's actually in love with him, desperately in love with him; and it was only just before I went to New Orleans that she said—"
"My dear," interrupted her mother, "there's no subject on which women change their minds oftener than on this. Love works wonders—indeed, the only miracles left in the world are of his creation."