“Yes, I hope so, Emily. By the way, Emily, you have grown quite a woman since I saw you last. It is now better than two years, I think, since then.”
“How did you like the Continent, John?”
“Why, my dear girl, how is this? What sympathy can you feel with the experience of a young fellow like me on the Continent? When you know the world better, my dear girl, you will feel the impropriety of asking such a question. Pray be seated, my lord.”
Lord Cullamore sat, as if unconsciously, in an arm-chair beside the table on which were placed his son's dressings and medicines, and resting his head on his hand for a moment, as if suffering pain, at length raised it, and said,
“No, Dunroe; no. I trust my innocent girl will never live to feel the impropriety of asking a question so natural?”
“I'm sure I hope not, my lord, with all my heart,” replied Dunroe. “Have you been presented, Emily? Have you been brought out?”
“She has been presented,” said her father, “but not brought out; nor is it my intention, in the obvious sense of that word, that she ever shall.”
“Oh, your lordship perhaps has a tendency to Popery, then, and there is a convent in the background? Is that it, my good lord?” he asked, smiling.
“No,” replied his father, who could not help smiling in return, “not at all, John. Emily will not require to be brought out, nor paraded through the debasing formalities of fashion. She shall not be excluded from fashion, certainly; but neither shall I suffer her to run the vulgar gauntlet of heartless dissipation, which too often hardens, debases, and corrupts. But a truce to this; the subject is painful to me; let us change it.”
The last observation of Dunroe to his sister startled her so much that she blushed deeply, and looked with that fascinating timidity which is ever associated with innocence and purity from her brother to her father.