only wished, my dear, you could hear Mr. Withers
express himself on those subjects,--his ideas were so delightfully
"your deal, my love"--clear, his illustrations so sweetly pretty, and
his manner so earnest; really, he stirred her like--"hearts, did you
say?--a trump."

Josephine Splurge contented herself with letting down her back hair for
Mr. Withers and making eyes at him.

"Good-morrow to the guileless Genevieve!"--Withers delighted in
dispensing equivocal nothings to the dowdy Muse of the sofa and back
hair.--"Charming weather!"

"There, you bewildering Joseph Surface, you need not go on,--I know
what you are going to say, and I will neither be flattered nor
fascinated. Come, confess now, like a dear candid creature, throw off
your irresistibly bewitching mask, and own that your sentiments are all
rhetoric."

"Josy, dear," Adelaide would insinuate, "what a wonderful memory you
have!--so well managed, too! Now whom _did_ you hear say that?"

Josephine was wont to declare that the Admirable Crichton lived again
in that kaleidoscopic creature; but he was so dazzling, so bewildering,
so dangerous, that to converse with him was like having fireworks in
one's boudoir.

With Madeline Withers was on strange terms, if any terms at all. She
threatened to him in the middle of his best stories, smiled quietly
when he preached, yawned to his poetical recitations, left the room
when he sang, mistook the subjects of his sketches with a
verisimilitude of innocence that often deceived even himself, was
silent and sneered much whenever he was present. And all these
rudenesses she performed with a successful air of genuine abstraction;
they never failed of their intention by being overdone, or by being too
_directly_ directed at him.

Remarks seldom passed between these two; when they did, Withers spoke
always first, and Madeline replied briefly and with politeness. And yet
there were occasions when a sharp-sighted and suspicious observer might
have detected a strange discomposure in Madeline's conduct in the
presence of Withers,--when, indeed, she seemed to be laboring under
irritability, and proneness to singular excitement, which began with
his entrance and disappeared with his departure. At such times she
would break her haughty quiet with fierce sallies upon her sisters; but
Withers stung her back into silence with sharp and telling retorts,--as
you may have seen a practised beast-tamer in a cage flog an angry
tigres