“How many?”
“Well, three or four: and none of them are disagreeable.”
“Are you going to introduce me?”
“They’re in bed now—it’s half past eight—and they’d be asleep if it didn’t keep them awake to wonder who you are. If you’ll come to-morrow I’ll introduce you.”
“Good! Now I’ve been pretty satisfactory about Easton, I think—”
“I don’t see how you could have said less. Every word was extorted from you.”
“What I want to know,” continued Gilbert, “is whether the loveliest being in West Pekin, not to say the world, counts among your fair fifteen.”
When Mrs. Gilbert married, her husband’s youngest brother, William, had come to live with them, his father and mother being dead, and his brothers and sisters preoccupied with their own children. He was not in his teens yet, and she had taken the handsome, dark-eyed, black-headed boy under the fond protection which young married ladies sometimes like to bestow upon pretty boy brothers-in-law. This kindness, at first a little romantic, became, with the process of years that brought her no children of her own, a love more like that of mother and son between them. Her condescension had vastly flattered the handsome lad; as he grew older, she seemed to him the brightest as well as the kindest woman in the world; and now, after a score of years, when the crow was beginning to leave his footprints at the corners of her merry eyes, and she had fallen into that permanent disrepair which seems the destiny of so much youthful strength and spirit among our women, he knew no one whose company was more charming. The tacit compliment of his devotion doubtless touched a woman who was long past compliments in most things; something like health and youth he always seemed to bring back to her whenever he returned to her from absences that grew longer and longer after her husband removed to Boston—Mrs. Gilbert’s native city—and left William to follow his young man’s devices in New York. Through all changes and chances she had remained constant to this pet of her early matronhood, now a man past thirty. It was her great affliction that she could not watch over him at that distance in the dangerous and important matter of marriage, for she was both zealous and jealous that he should marry to the utmost advantage that the scant resources of her sex allowed, and it was but a partial consolation that she still had him to be anxious about.
They were sitting together in her hospitable room by the light of a kerosene lamp, with the mosquitoes, which swarm in West Pekin up to the end of July, baffled by window nettings. She rose dramatically, shut the window that opened upon the piazza, and said, “You haven’t seen her already! Where?”
“In one of the back pastures.”