rners of her eyes, with
only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly
leap forth in a peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's
'Undiscovered Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for
love: 'Feeling foolish.'--'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye,
gentlemen?' she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I
guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look.'--If she
would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we
knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the
potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully,
wistfully, as he often did, 'She could love like Hell.' Once, in a
reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank.
'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. 'Do
you think that's a pretty word? But--I dare say I could.'

'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued
gloomily.

'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't
approve of matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord
help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So
capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and
disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No,
I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't
marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him--ah!' She placed two
fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the
skies.

This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the
three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly
at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some
day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast;
we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but
because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy
of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her. I think we
conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and
contemptibly meticulous in his dress. He would probably not be of the
Quarter; he would sneer at _us_.

'He'll not understand her, he'll not respect her. Take her peculiar
views. We know where she gets them. But he--he'll despise her for
them, at the very time he's profiting by 'em,' some one said.

Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant.
She had got them from her father