Ispahan to
Saxony, which his Majesty was at present invading, and about which war
papa was so busy with his maps and his newspapers? She brought down the
Persian Tales from her mamma's closet, and laid them slily on the table
in the parlour where the family sate. She would not marry a Persian
prince for her part; she would prefer a gentleman who might not have
more than one wife at a time. She called our young Virginian Theo's
gentleman, Theo's prince. She asked her mamma if she wished her, Hetty,
to take the other visitor, the black prince, for herself? Indeed, she
rallied her sister and her mother unceasingly on their sentimentalities,
and would never stop until she had made them angry, when she would begin
to cry herself, and kiss them violently one after the other, and coax
them back into good-humour. Simple Harry Warrington, meanwhile, knew
nothing of all the jokes, the tears, quarrels, reconciliations, hymeneal
plans, and so forth, of which he was the innocent occasion. A hundred
allusions to the Prussians and Persians were shot at him, and those
Parthian arrows did not penetrate his hide at all. A Shaw? A Sophy?
Very likely he thought a Sophy was a lady, and would have deemed it the
height of absurdity that a man with a great black beard should have
any such name. We fall into the midst of a quiet family: we drop like a
stone, say, into a pool,--we are perfectly compact and cool, and little
know the flutter and excitement we make there, disturbing the fish,
frightening the ducks, and agitating the whole surface of the water.
How should Harry know the effect which his sudden appearance produced in
this little, quiet, sentimental family? He thought quite well enough of
himself on many points, but was diffident as yet regarding women, being
of that age when young gentlemen require encouragement and to be brought
forward, and having been brought up at home in very modest and primitive
relations towards the other sex. So Miss Hetty's jokes played round the
lad, and he minded them no more than so many summer gnats. It was not
that he was stupid, as she certainly thought him: he was simple, too
much occupied with himself and his own honest affairs to think of
others. Why, what tragedies, comedies, interludes, intrigues, farces,
are going on under our noses in friends' drawing-rooms where we visit
every day, and we remain utterly ignorant, self-satisfied, and blind!
As these sisters sate and combed their flowing ringlets