I expected to see her wince and change colour. On the contrary, she remained perfectly impassive. She did not even ask me what I thought of him, or if I liked him, or anything about him. All she said was, “I hope you and he will get on together. He seems a very nice sort of young man.”
Love prompts a thousand absurdities; but never in all my experience of life could I conceive a girl calling the object of her affection “a nice young man.” The phrase smote me as the death-knell of Curling’s hopes, if he had any.
“I don’t very much care about nice young men,” I answered. “I have been bred in a land of piquant sauces and thickly peppered dishes, and like things well flavoured. A nice person is a boiled character which you have to discuss without salt.”
“I know what you mean,” she exclaimed gaily. “Mr. Meek, our doctor here, is a boiled character, full of what papa calls negative excellence, which means thorough insipidity.”
I was much gratified to find her capable of appreciating my jokes. It did seem impossible that such demure, sweet, intelligent eyes as hers should be the windows of a sluggish, dull nature. I was resolved to try her a little more on the subject of the cashier.
“Your father gave me to understand that Mr. Curling was good-looking. How people differ in their tastes? Now I think Mr. Curling anything but good looking.”
“He is very thin.”
“Very; one thing I noticed, the cockneyfication of his person by a big ring on his first finger. These fellows ought to go abroad now and then. ‘Home keeping youths have ever homely wits.’”
“But don’t you know what another poet says?
‘What learn our youth abroad but to refine