The Mystery of Metropolisville | Page 6

And he was soon in a current of delightful talk. The young gentleman spoke with great enthusiasm; the young woman without warmth, but with a clear intellectual interest in literary subjects, that charmed her interlocutor. I say literary subjects, though the range of the conversation was not very wide. It was a great surprise to Charlton, however, to find in a new country a young woman so well informed.
Did he fall in love? Gentle reader, be patient. You want a love-story, and I don't blame you. For my part, I should not take the trouble to record this history if there were no love in it. Love is the universal bond of human sympathy. But you must give people time. What we call falling in love is not half so simple an affair as you think, though it often looks simple enough to the spectator. Albert Charlton was pleased, he was full of enthusiasm, and I will not deny that he several times reflected in a general way that so clear a talker and so fine a thinker would make a charming wife for some man--some intellectual man--some man like himself, for instance. He admired Miss Minorkey. He liked her. With an enthusiastic young man, admiring and liking are, to say the least, steps that lead easily to something else. But you must remember how complex a thing love is. Charlton--I have to confess it--was a little conceited, as every young man is at twenty. He flattered himself that the most intelligent woman he could find would be a good match for him. He loved ideas, and a woman of ideas pleased his fancy. Add to this that he had come to a time of life when he was very liable to fall in love with somebody, and that he was in the best of spirits from the influence of air and scenery and motion and novelty, and you render it quite probable that he could not be tossed for half a day on the same seat in a coach with such a girl as Helen Minorkey was--that, above all, he could not discuss Hugh Miller and the "Vestiges of Creation" with her, without imminent peril of experiencing an admiration for her and an admiration for himself, and a liking and a palpitating and a castle-building that under favorable conditions might somehow grow into that complex and inexplicable feeling which we call love.
In fact, Jim, who drove both routes on this day, and who peeped into the coach whenever he stopped to water, soliloquized that two fools with idees would make a quare span ef they had a neck-yoke on.

CHAPTER III.
LAND AND LOVE.
Mr. Minorkey and the fat gentleman found much to interest them as the coach rolled over the smooth prairie road, now and then crossing a slough. Not that Mr. Minorkey or his fat friend had any particular interest in the beautiful outline of the grassy knolls, the gracefulness of the water-willows that grew along the river edge, and whose paler green was the prominent feature of the landscape, or in the sweet contrast at the horizon where grass-green earth met the light blue northern sky. But the scenery none the less suggested fruitful themes for talk to the two gentlemen on the back-seat.
"I've got money loaned on that quarter at three per cent a month and five after due. The mortgage has a waiver in it too. You see, the security was unusually good, and that was why I let him have it so low." This was what Mr. Minorkey said at intervals and with some variations, generally adding something like this: "The day I went to look at that claim, to see whether the security was good or not, I got caught in the rain. I expected it would kill me. Well, sir, I was taken that night with a pain--just here--and it ran through the lung to the point of the shoulder-blade--here. I had to get my feet into a tub of water and take some brandy. I'd a had pleurisy if I'd been in any other country but this. I tell you, nothing saved me but the oxygen in this air. There! there's a forty that I lent a hundred dollars on at five per cent a month and six per cent after maturity, with a waiver in the mortgage. The day I came here to see this I was nearly dead. I had a--"
Just here the fat gentleman would get desperate, and, by way of preventing the completion of the dolorous account, would break out with: "That's Sokaska, the new town laid out by Johnson--that hill over there, where you see those stakes. I bought a corner-lot fronting the public square, and a block opposite where they hope to get a factory. There's a