The
good-natured, hollow captain was fortified against passion by
self-admiration. She said to herself: "Now here is a peg with a
military suit hanging to it; if I can only fix my eyes on this piece
of wood and regimentals, and make warm love to it, the love that poets
have dreamed and romances described, I may surely hope to disgust my
two admirers, and then they will abandon me and despise me. Ah! I
could love them if they would only do that."
Well, for a young lady that had never, to her knowledge, felt the
tender passion, the imitation thereof which she now favored that
little society with was a wonderful piece of representation. Was
Kenealy absent, behold Lucy uneasy and restless; was he present; but
at a distance, her eye demurely devoured him; was he near her, she
wooed him with such a god-like mixture of fire, of tenderness, of
flattery, of tact; she did so serpentinely approach and coil round the
soldier and his mental cavity, that all the males in creation should
have been permitted to defile past (like the beasts going into the
ark), and view this sweet picture a moment, and infer how women would
be wooed, and then go and do it. Effect:
Talboys and Hardie mortified to the heart's core; thought they had
altogether mistaken her character. "She is a love-sick fool."
On Bazalgette: "Ass! Dodd was worth a hundred of him."
On Kenealy: made him twirl his mustache.
On Fountain: filled him with dismay. There remained only one to be
hoodwinked.
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