It was not long before I had an opportunity of renewing my friendship with Miss Gledd—for our acquaintance had latterly amounted to a friendship—and of seeing the Englishman with her. As it happened, he also was a friend of my own—an old friend, and the last man in the world whom I should have picked out as a husband for Ophelia. He was a literary man of some mark, fifteen years her senior, very sedate in his habits, not much given to lovemaking, and possessed of a small fortune sufficient for his own wants, but not sufficient to enable him to marry with what he would consider comfort. Such was Mr. Pryor, and I was given to understand that Mr. Pryor was a suppliant at the feet of Ophelia. He was a suppliant, too, with so much hope, that Hannibal Hoskins and the other suitors were up in arms against him. I saw them together at some evening assembly, and on the next morning I chanced to be in Miss Gledd’s drawing-room. On my entrance there were others there, but the first moment that we were alone, she turned round sharp upon me with a question—
“You know your countryman, Mr. Pryor; what sort of a man is he?”
“But you know him also,” I answered. “If the rumours in Boston are true, he is already a favourite in Chesnut Street.”
“Well, then, for once in a way the rumours in Boston are true, for he is a favourite. But that is no reason you shouldn’t tell me what sort of a man he is. You’ve known him these ten years.”
“Pretty nearly twenty,” I said. I had known him ten or twelve.
“Ah,” said she, “you want to make him out to be older than he is. I knew his age today.”
“And does he know yours?”
“He may if he wishes it. Everybody in Boston knows it—including yourself. Now tell me; what sort of man is Mr. Pryor?”
“He is a man highly esteemed in his own country.”
“So much I knew before; and he is highly esteemed here also. But I hardly understand what high estimation means in your country.”
“It is much the same thing in all countries, as I take it,” said I.
“There you are absolutely wrong. Here in the States, if a man be highly esteemed it amounts almost to everything; such estimation will carry him everywhere—and will carry his wife everywhere too, so as to give her a chance of making standing ground for herself.”
“But Mr. Pryor has not got a wife.”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course he hasn’t got a wife, and of course you know what I mean.”
But I did not know what she meant. I knew that she was meditating whether or no it would be good for her to become Mrs. Pryor, and that she was endeavouring to get from me some information which might assist her in coming to a decision on that matter; but I did not understand the exact gist and point of her enquiry.
“You have so many prejudices of which we know nothing,” she continued. “Now don’t put your back up and fight for that blessed old country of yours, as though I were attacking it.”
“It is a blessed old country,” said I, patriotically.
“Quite so; very blessed, and very old—and very nice too, I’m sure. But you must admit that you have prejudices. You are very much the better, perhaps, for having them. I often wish that we had a few.” Then she stopped her tongue, and asked no further question about Mr. Pryor; but it seemed to me that she wanted me to go on with the conversation.
“I hate discussing the relative merits of the two countries,” said I; “and I especially hate to discuss them with you. You always begin as though you meant to be fair, and end by an amount of unfairness, that—that—”
“Which would be insolent if I were not a woman, and which is pert as I am one. That is what you mean.”
“Something like it.”
“And yet I love your country so dearly, that I would sooner live there than in any other land in the world, if only I thought that I could be accepted. You English people,” she continued, “are certainly wanting in intelligence, or you would read in the anxiety of all we say about England how much we all think of you. What will England say of us? what will England think of us? what will England do in this or that matter as it concerns us? that is our first thought as to every matter that is of importance to us. We abuse you, and admire you. You abuse us, and despise us. That is the difference. So you won’t tell me anything about Mr. Pryor? Well, I shan’t ask you again. I never again ask a favour that has been refused.” Then she turned away to some old gentleman that was talking to her mother, and the conversation was at an end.
I must confess, that as I walked away from Chesnut Street into Beacon Street, and across the common, my anxiety was more keen with regard to Mr. Pryor than as concerned Miss Gledd. He was an Englishman and an old friend, and being also a man not much younger than myself, he was one regarding whom I might, perhaps, form some correct judgment as to what would and what would not suit him. Would he do well in taking Ophelia Gledd home to England with him as his wife? Would she be accepted there, as she herself had phrased it—accepted in such fashion as to make him contented? She was intelligent—so intelligent that few women whom she would meet in her proposed new country could beat her there; she was pleasant, good-humoured, true, as I believed; but would she be accepted in London? There was a freedom and easiness about her, a readiness to say anything
