Cecilia, for the first time in her life, was piqued,
and, strange to say, began to feel more interest about
this indifferent stranger than about the popular,
animated, pleasant George Belvoir, who she knew by
womanly instinct was as much in love with her as he
could be.
Cecilia Travers that night on retiring to rest told
her maid, smilingly, that she was too tired to have
her hair done; and yet, when the maid was dismissed,
she looked at herself in the glass more gravely and
more discontentedly than she had ever looked there
before; and, tired though she was, stood at the window
gazing into the moonlit night for a good hour after
the maid left her.
KENELM CHILLINGLY has now been several days a guest
at Neesdale Park. He has recovered speech; the
other guests have gone, including George Belvoir.
Leopold Travers has taken a great fancy to Kenelm.
Leopold was one of those men, not uncommon perhaps
in England, who, with great mental energies, have
little book-knowledge, and when they come in contact
with a book-reader who is not a pedant feel a pleasant
excitement in his society, a source of interest in
comparing notes with him, a constant surprise in finding
by what venerable authorities the deductions which
their own mother-wit has drawn from life are supported,
or by what cogent arguments derived from books those
deductions are contravened or upset. Leopold Travers
had in him that sense of humour which generally accompanies
a strong practical understanding (no man, for instance,
has more practical understanding than a Scot, and
no man has a keener susceptibility to humour), and
not only enjoyed Kenelm’s odd way of expressing
himself, but very often mistook Kenelm’s irony
for opinion spoken in earnest.
Since his early removal from the capital and his devotion
to agricultural pursuits, it was so seldom that Leopold
Travers met a man by whose conversation his mind was
diverted to other subjects than those which were incidental
to the commonplace routine of his life that he found
in Kenelm’s views of men and things a source
of novel amusement, and a stirring appeal to such
metaphysical creeds of his own as had been formed
unconsciously, and had long reposed unexamined in
the recesses of an intellect shrewd and strong, but
more accustomed to dictate than to argue. Kenelm,
on his side, saw much in his host to like and to admire;
but, reversing their relative positions in point of
years, he conversed with Travers as with a mind younger
than his own. Indeed, it was one of his crotchety
theories that each generation is in substance mentally
older than the generation preceding it, especially
in all that relates to science; and, as he would say,
“The study of life is a science, and not an art.”
