"thank Heaven, that all men have not such
barbarous ideas! Why, I would go fifty miles to a good ball!" Be not
alarmed, my dear young lady; give me but a moment to thank Providence,
in my turn, that you are neither my sister nor my daughter, and will
promise you, that you shall never be my wife.

On the Saturday night then, I made Gordon and Willingham both very
cross, and caught Sydney Dawson's eye looking over his spectacles with
supreme contempt, when I declared my decided intention of staying at
home the night of the ball. Even the Reverend Robert Hanmer, who was
going himself, was annoyed when Gordon told him of what he called my
wilfulness, having a notion that it was decidedly disrespectful in any
of us, either to go when he did _not_, or to decline going, when he
_did_.

On the Tuesday morning, I sent to B---- for white kids. Gordon looked
astonished, Hanmer was glad that I had "taken his advice," and
Willingham laughed outright; he had overheard Clara Phillips ask me to
dance with her. Men _are_ like green gooseberries--very green ones;
women _do_ make fools of them, and a comparatively small proportion of
sugar, in the shape of flattery, is sufficient.

Two days before the regatta, there marched into Mrs Jenkins's open
doorway, a bewildered looking gentleman, shaking off the dust from his
feet in testimony of having had a long walk, and enquiring for Hanmer.
Gwenny, with her natural grace, trotted up stairs before him, put her
head in at the "drawing-room" door, (she seemed always conscious that
the less one saw of her person the better,) and having announced
briefly, but emphatically, "a gentlemans," retreated. Hanmer had puzzled
himself and me, by an attempt to explain a passage which Aristotle, of
course, would have put in plainer language, if he had known what he
meant himself--but modern philosophers are kind enough to help him out
occasionally--when the entrance of the gentleman in dust cut the Gordian
knot, and saved the Stagyrite from the disgrace of having a pretty bit
of esoteric abstruseness translated into common sense.

(What a blessing would it be for Dr ----, and Professor ----, if they
might be allowed to mystify their readers in Greek! though, to do them
justice, they have turned the Queen's English to good account for that
purpose, and have produced passages which first-class men, at an
Athenian University, might possibly construe, but which the whole board
of sophists might be defied to