In the meantime Olivia and Mr. Glascock had moved away together, and Miss Petrie was left alone. This was no injury to Miss Petrie, as her mind at once set itself to work on a sonnet touching the frivolity of modern social gatherings; and when she complained afterwards to Caroline that it was the curse of their mode of life that no moment could be allowed for thought—in which she referred specially to a few words that Mr. Gore had addressed to her at this moment of her meditations—she was not wilfully a hypocrite. She was painfully turning her second set of rhymes, and really believed that she had been subjected to a hardship. In the meantime Olivia and Mr. Glascock were discussing her at a distance.
“You were being put through your facings, Mr. Glascock,” Olivia had said.
“Well; yes; and your dear friend, Miss Petrie, is rather a stern examiner.”
“She is Carry’s ally, not mine,” said Olivia. Then she remembered that by saying this she might be doing her sister an injury. Mr. Glascock might object to such a bosom friend for his wife. “That is to say, of course we are all intimate with her, but just at this moment Carry is most in favour.”
“She is very clever, I am quite sure,” said he.
“Oh yes;—she’s a genius. You must not doubt that on the peril of making every American in Italy your enemy.”
“She is a poet—is she not?”
“Mr. Glascock!”
“Have I said anything wrong?” he asked.
“Do you mean to look me in the face and tell me that you are not acquainted with her works—that you don’t know pages of them by heart, that you don’t sleep with them under your pillow, don’t travel about with them in your dressing-bag? I’m afraid we have mistaken you, Mr. Glascock.”
“Is it so great a sin?”
“If you’ll own up honestly, I’ll tell you something—in a whisper. You have not read a word of her poems?”
“Not a word.”
“Neither have I. Isn’t it horrible? But, perhaps, if I heard Tennyson talking every day, I shouldn’t read Tennyson. Familiarity does breed contempt;—doesn’t it? And then poor dear Wallachia is such a bore. I sometimes wonder, when English people are listening to her, whether they think that American girls generally talk like that.”
“Not all, perhaps, with that perfected eloquence.”
“I dare say you do,” continued Olivia, craftily. “That is just the way in which people form their opinions about foreigners. Some specially self-asserting American speaks his mind louder than other people, and then you say that all Americans are self-asserting.”
“But you are a little that way given, Miss Spalding.”
“Because we are always called upon to answer accusations against us, expressed or unexpressed. We don’t think ourselves a bit better than you; or, if the truth were known, half as good. We are always struggling to be as polished and easy as the French, or as sensible and dignified as the English; but when our defects are thrown in our teeth—”
“Who throws them in your teeth, Miss Spalding?”
“You look it—all of you—if you do not speak it out. You do assume a superiority, Mr. Glascock; and that we cannot endure.”
“I do not feel that I assume anything,” said Mr. Glascock, meekly.
“If three gentlemen be together, an Englishman, a Frenchman, and an American, is not the American obliged to be on his mettle to prove that he is somebody among the three? I admit that he is always claiming to be the first; but he does so only that he may not be too evidently the last. If you knew us, Mr. Glascock, you would find us to be very mild, and humble and nice, and good, and clever, and kind, and charitable, and beautiful—in short, the finest people that have as yet been created on the broad face of God’s smiling earth.” These last words she pronounced with a nasal twang, and in a tone of voice which almost seemed to him to be a direct mimicry of the American Minister. The upshot of the conversation, however, was that the disgust against Americans which, to a certain degree, had been excited in Mr. Glascock’s mind by the united efforts of Mr. Spalding and the poetess, had been almost entirely dispelled. From all of which the reader ought to understand that Miss Olivia Spalding was a very clever young woman.
But nevertheless Mr. Glascock had not quite made up his mind to ask the elder sister to be his wife. He was one of those men to whom lovemaking does not come very easy, although he was never so much at his ease as when he was in company with ladies. He was sorely in want of a wife, but he was aware that at different periods during the last fifteen years he had been angled for as a fish. Mothers in England had tried to catch him, and of such mothers he had come to have the strongest possible detestation. He had seen the hooks—or perhaps had fancied
