“Well, girls, I have intelligence here that makes me very happy. I have at length prevailed with a young friend of mine, to leave the city and pass a few weeks with me during the hottest of the season, and I am so very glad—”
“O, so am I,” interrupted Miss Charlotte Varley, a very languishing young lady, who had great hopes of success with Mr. Style, since she had joined his communion and was a teacher in his Sabbath-school—but withal a belle—“a young gentleman from the city will be very refreshing this terrible weather—I hope he is a pious man, Mrs. Tower—we have so few of those—and that he will bring us some new plans about Sabbath-schools and benevolent societies such as are found to be most useful in the city!”
Miss Varley closed her remarks with a small sigh, and looked at Mr. Style for pious sympathy. Mr. Style that moment turned away to pluck a drooping blossom that hung near him, and some of the ruder minxes indulged in mischievous glances and a smothered laugh.
“I declare, Charlotte,” interposed Miss Emilie Jones, who was one of Miss Varley’s most sincere despisers, “the effervescence of your regard for Sabbath-schools and ‘cent societies,’ has quite anticipated the sequel of Mrs. Tower’s story—you did not allow her time to say whether we are to be favored by the accession of a lady or a gentleman to our little country community—but consulting your own fancy, I suppose you took it for granted it must be a ‘pious young gentleman.’ ”
The color deepened in Charlotte’s really beautiful face, as a glimpse of her ridiculous position flashed from Emilie’s playful satire, and to increase her confusion, the girls all laughed more saucily than before. There might have been some serious heart-burnings, but Mrs. Tower came to the rescue.
“Charlotte is entirely excusable, young ladies,” she said, “and I am responsible for her remark by my own ambiguity. My friend is a lady, and one of the loveliest of her sex in mind and heart. I have not seen her since she grew into a woman, but I am confident from what I know of the development of her character, I shall not be disappointed in the promise of her childhood. She will be here in two weeks at most, and possibly sooner. Now I am old and dull girls, and I shall draw largely on your vivacity for her entertainment, at first for my sake, and afterward, when you know her, for her own.”
“O yes, indeed, Mrs. Tower,” promised the girls, and none more promptly than Charlotte and Adelaide Varley, both for themselves and for their mother and three sisters at home. They would specially make a party for her, though they had determined to make no parties till their friends, Mrs. Tyler and her daughter, very genteel people from New York, should come, which event could not certainly be hoped for at least for three weeks. And Misses Charlotte and Adelaide telegraphed to each other, while the rest were promising their attentions, how much pleasure it must afford Mrs. Tyler and Elizabeth if they should happen to recognize a city acquaintance in Mrs. Tower’s expected visiter—“as their metropolitan friends,” Charlotte remarked, “were so very gay and fashionable, they had sometimes languished in the country for a city face or something that looked familiar.”
“It must be a melancholy and most insupportable deprivation,” chimed in Emilie Jones, “to spend a whole fortnight on the stretch in such an ugly and unsightly village as this of N. has the reputation of being, especially in the summer, and all that time, not so much as see fiery red brick palisades towering up on both sides of you, and pouring down on your ‘devoted head’ a perfect torrent of heat! I am sure if I were anybody’s ‘metropolitan friends,’ I should mourn being obliged to set my feet on the cool grass! How I should miss the scorching them on a hot pavement, to say nothing of the disadvantage to my lungs of inhaling fresh clear air, instead of dust and cigar smoke, and all sorts of vile fumes and abominations! What is your taste, Mr. Style?”
“I am a great lover of the country, and particularly of this beautiful village, Miss Emilie,” gallantly replied Mr. Style.
“Well, well, Emilie, enough of your mischief for once,” said Adelaide Varley, with a very severe smile which she meant for an indifferent one. “We all know you are more wicked than citified. But my watch says it is time to go home, and I guess Mrs. Tower will be glad to be rid of such a set of chatter-boxes as we have proved ourselves this time.”