“Mr. Bovill, you offered to shake hands:
shake hands now, and promise me, with the good grace
of one honourable combatant to another, that Miss
Elsie shall go to her aunt the schoolmistress at once
if she wishes it. Hark ye, my friend” (this
in Mr. Bovill’s ear): “a man can
never manage a woman. Till a woman marries, a
prudent man leaves her to women; when she does marry,
she manages her husband, and there’s an end
of it.”
Kenelm was gone.
“Oh, wise young man!” murmured the uncle.
“Elsie, dear, how can you go to your aunt’s
while you are in that dress?”
Elsie started as from a trance, her eyes directed
towards the doorway through which Kenelm had vanished.
“This dress,” she said contemptuously,
“this dress; is not that easily altered with
shops in the town?”
“Gad!” muttered Mr. Bovill, “that
youngster is a second Solomon; and if I can’t
manage Elsie, she’ll manage a husband—whenever
she gets one.”
“BY the powers that guard innocence and celibacy,”
soliloquized Kenelm Chillingly, “but I have
had a narrow escape! and had that amphibious creature
been in girl’s clothes instead of boy’s,
when she intervened like the deity of the ancient
drama, I might have plunged my armorial Fishes into
hot water. Though, indeed, it is hard to suppose
that a young lady head-over-ears in love with Mr.
Compton yesterday could have consigned her affections
to me to-day. Still she looked as if she could,
which proves either that one is never to trust a woman’s
heart or never to trust a woman’s looks.
Decimus Roach is right. Man must never relax
his flight from the women, if he strives to achieve
an ‘Approach to the Angels.’”
These reflections were made by Kenelm Chillingly as,
having turned his back upon the town in which such
temptations and trials had befallen him, he took his
solitary way along a footpath that wound through meads
and cornfields, and shortened by three miles the distance
to a cathedral town at which he proposed to rest for
the night.
He had travelled for some hours, and the sun was beginning
to slope towards a range of blue hills in the west,
when he came to the margin of a fresh rivulet, overshadowed
by feathery willows and the quivering leaves of silvery
Italian poplars. Tempted by the quiet and cool
of this pleasant spot, he flung himself down on the
banks, drew from his knapsack some crusts of bread
with which he had wisely provided himself, and, dipping
them into the pure lymph as it rippled over its pebbly
bed, enjoyed one of those luxurious repasts for which
epicures would exchange their banquet in return for
the appetite of youth. Then, reclining along
the bank, and crushing the wild thyme that grows best
and sweetest in wooded coverts, provided they be neighboured
by water, no matter whether in pool or rill, he resigned
himself to that intermediate state between thought
and dream-land which we call “revery.”
At a little distance he heard the low still sound of
the mower’s scythe, and the air came to his
brow sweet with the fragrance of new-mown hay.
