Lippincotts Magazine, August, 1885 | Page 4

told
me that you quite detest the English, so that she wonders you should
have married me. And I said that you were far too intelligent and just to
cherish wrong feelings toward any people, much less my people."
"Well, if she represented England I should drop England quietly over
the rapids some day when I could no longer stand her infernal

patronizing, impertinent airs, and rid the world of a nuisance," said Mr.
Ketchum, with energy. "Excuse my warmth, but that woman would
poison a prairie for me. Fortunately, I happen to know that she only
represents a class which neither Church nor State there has the
authority to shoot, _yet_, and I am not going to cry down white wool
because there are black sheep. Look at Sir Robert, and Miss Noel, and
all the rest of them, how different they are."
Captain Kendall certainly found Niagara delightful, for, owing to the
absorption of the party in their different pursuits, he was able to see
more of Ethel than he had ever done. He was so different from the men
she had known that he was a continual study to her. Instead of the
studied indifference, shy avoidance, shy advances, culminating in a
blunt and straightforward declaration of "intentions," which she would
have thought natural in an admirer, followed by transparent, honest
delight in the event of acceptance, or manly submission to the
inevitable in the event of rejection, Captain Kendall had surprised her
by liking her immediately, or at least by showing that he did, and
seeking her persistently, without any pretence of concealment. He
talked to her of politics, of social questions in the broadest sense, of
books, scientific discoveries, his travels, and the travels of others. He
read whole volumes of poetry to her. He discoursed by the hour on the
manly character, its faults, merits, peculiarities, and possibilities, and
then contrasted it with the womanly one, trait for trait, and it seemed to
her that women had never been praised so eloquently, enthusiastically,
copiously. At no time was he in the least choked by his feelings or at a
loss for a fresh word or sentiment. Such romance, such ideality, such
universality, as it were, she had never met. When his admiration was
most unbridled it seemed to be offered to her as the representative of a
sex entirely perfect and lovely. Everything in heaven and earth,
apparently, ministered to his passion and made him talk all around the
beloved subject with a wealth of simile and suggestion that she had
never dreamed of. But, if he gave full expression to his agitated
feelings in these ways, he was extremely delicate, respectful, reserved,
in others. He wrapped up his heart in so many napkins, indeed, that,
being a practical woman not extraordinarily gifted in the matter of
imagination, she frequently lost sight of it altogether, and she
sometimes failed to follow him in a broad road of sentiment that (like

the Western ones which Longfellow has described) narrowed and
narrowed until it disappeared, a mere thread, up a tree. If he looked
long, after one of these flights, at her sweet English face to see what
impression he had made, he was often forced to see that it was not the
one he had meant to make at all.
"Is anything amiss?" she asked once, in her cool, level tone, fixing
upon him her sincerely honest eyes. "Are there blacks on my nose?"
Although she had distinctly refused him at Kalsing, as became a girl
destitute of vanity and coquetry and attached to some one else, she had
not found him the less fluent, omnipresent, persuasive, at Niagara. It
was diverting to see them seated side by side on Goat Island, he waving
his hand toward the blue sky, apostrophizing the water, the foliage, the
clouds, and what not, in prose and verse, quite content if he but got a
quiet glance and assenting word now and then, she listening demurely
in a state of protestant satisfaction, her fair hair very dazzling in the
sunshine, an unvarying apple-blossom tint in her calm face, her fingers
tatting industriously not to waste the time outright. It was very
agreeable in a way, she told herself, but something must really be done
to get rid of the man. And so, one morning when they chanced to be
alone, and he was being unusually ethereal and beautiful in his remarks,
telling her that, as Byron had said, she would be "the morning star of
memory" for him, she broke in squarely, "That is all very nice; very
pretty, I am sure. But I do hope you quite understand that I have not the
least idea of marrying you. There is no use in going on like this, you
know, and