Phoebe, Junior

too impossible to bear thinking of. But this had never entered his mind. He wanted to see Phoebe to talk to her, to be near her, as something very new, captivating and full of interest⁠—that was all. No one else within his sphere could talk so well. The Rector was very great indeed on the reredos question, and the necessity of reviving the disused “Church” customs; but Reginald could not go so far as he did as to the importance of the reredos, and was quite in doubt whether it was not as well for most people to “direct” themselves by their own consciences as to be directed by the spiritual head of the parish, who was not over wise in his own concerns. His father, Reginald knew, could be very agreeable among strangers, but he seldom chose to be so in his own house. All this made the advent of Phoebe appear to him like a sudden revelation out of a different world. He was an Oxford man, with the best of education, but he was a simpleton all the same. He thought he saw in her an evidence of what life was like in those intellectual professional circles which a man may hope to get into only in London. It was not the world of fashion he was aware, but he thought in his simplicity that it was the still higher world of culture and knowledge, in which genius, and wit, and intellect stood instead of rank or riches. How Tozer’s granddaughter had got admission there, he did not ask himself, but this was what he thought, and to talk to her was a new sensation. He was quite unconscious of anything more.

Nobody knew when Ursula took her place at the head of the table in her pretty white dress, which she had worn at the Dorsets’, how much toil and anxiety the preparations had given her. At the last moment, when her mind was so far clear of the entrées, etc.⁠—as clear as the mind of an inexperienced dinner-giver can be, until the blessed moment when they are eaten and done with⁠—she had to take Sarah in hand, who was not very clear about the waiting, and to instruct her according to her own very imperfect knowledge how to fulfil her duties.

“Think it is not a dinner-party at all, but only just our ordinary luncheon, and don’t get fluttered; and when I look at you like this come quite close, and I will whisper what you are to do. And oh, Sarah, like a good creature, don’t break anything!” said Ursula almost with tears.

These were all the directions she could give, and they, it must be allowed, were somewhat vague. The excitement was becoming to her. She sat down with a dreadful flutter in her heart, but with her eyes shining and sparkling. Clarence Copperhead, who extended an arm very carelessly to take her downstairs, absolutely certain of being a more important person than his guest Northcote, was roused for the first time to the consciousness that she was very pretty, which he had not found out before. “But no style,” he said to himself. Phoebe was the one who had style. She sat between Mr. May and the stranger, but devoted herself to her host chiefly, displaying a gentle contempt of the younger men in his presence. No anxiety was in her mind about the dinner. She did not follow the fate of those entrées round the table with terrible palpitations, as poor Ursula did; and, alas, the entrées were not good, and Ursula had the mortification to see the dishes she had taken so much trouble with, rejected by one and another. Reginald ate some, for which she blessed him, and so did Phoebe, but Mr. May sent his plate away with polite execrations.

“Tell your cook she shall go if she sends up such uneatable stuff again, Ursula,” her father cried from the other end of the table.

Two big tears dashed up hot and scalding into Ursula’s eyes. Oh, how she wished she could be dismissed like Betsy! She turned those two little oceans of trouble piteously, without knowing it, upon Northcote, who had said something to her, without being able to reply to him. And Northcote, who was but a young man, though he was a fiery political Dissenter, and who had come to the Parsonage with a curious mixture of pleasure and reluctance, immediately threw down any arms that nature might have provided him with, and fell in love with her there and then on the spot! to his own absolute consternation. This was how it happened. The moment was not romantic, the situation was not sublime. A little motherless housekeeper crying because her father scolded her in public for a piece of bad cookery. There is nothing in this to make an idyll out of; but such as it was, it proved enough for Horace Northcote; he yielded himself on the spot. Not a word was said, for Ursula felt that if she tried to talk she must cry, and anything further from her troubled thoughts than love it would be impossible to imagine; but then and there, so far as the young man was concerned, the story began. He talked very little for the rest of the meal, and Ursula did not exert herself, though she recovered slightly when the mutton turned out to be very good, and was commended; but what was the mutton in comparison with her entrées, which she had made with her own hands, and which were a failure? She was reduced to silence, and she thought that the stranger at her left hand was nice, because he did not bother her, and was content with a very little talk.

“Oh, Phoebe, did you hear papa about those entrées?” she cried, when they reached the drawing-room; and sitting down on the stool by the fire which Janey usually appropriated, she cried, poor child, with undisguised passion. “I had