I could see my father’s countenance fall a little.

’You see she’s so clever she’s more like a man than a woman—­she knows Latin and Greek.’

’She’d forget ’em, if she’d a houseful of children,’ was my father’s comment on this.

’But she knows many a thing besides, and is wise as well as learned; she has been so much with her father.  She would never think much of me, and I should like my wife to think a deal of her husband.’

’It is not just book-learning or the want of it as makes a wife think much or little of her husband,’ replied my father, evidently unwilling to give up a project which had taken deep root in his mind.  ’It’s a something I don’t rightly know how to call it—­if he’s manly, and sensible, and straightforward; and I reckon you’re that, my boy.’

’I don’t think I should like to have a wife taller than I am, father,’ said I, smiling; he smiled too, but not heartily.

‘Well,’ said he, after a pause.  ’It’s but a few days I’ve been thinking of it, but I’d got as fond of my notion as if it had been a new engine as I’d been planning out.  Here’s our Paul, thinks I to myself, a good sensible breed o’ lad, as has never vexed or troubled his mother or me; with a good business opening out before him, age nineteen, not so bad-looking, though perhaps not to call handsome, and here’s his cousin, not too near cousin, but just nice, as one may say; aged seventeen, good and true, and well brought up to work with her hands as well as her head; a scholar—­but that can’t be helped, and is more her misfortune than her fault, seeing she is the only child of scholar—­and as I said afore, once she’s a wife and a she’ll forget it all, I’ll be bound—­with a good fortune in land and house when it shall please the Lord to take her parents to himself; with eyes like poor Molly’s for beauty, a colour that comes and goes on a milk-white skin, and as pretty a mouth—­,

‘Why, Mr Manning, what fair lady are you describing?’ asked Mr Holdsworth, who had come quickly and suddenly upon our tete-a-tete, and had caught my father’s last words as he entered the room.  Both my father and I felt rather abashed; it was such an odd subject for us to be talking about; but my father, like a straightforward simple man as he was, spoke out the truth.

’I’ve been telling Paul of Ellison’s offer, and saying how good an opening it made for him—­’

‘I wish I’d as good,’ said Mr Holdsworth.  ’But has the business a “pretty mouth”?

‘You’re always so full of your joking, Mr Holdsworth,’ said my father.  ’I was going to say that if he and his cousin Phillis Holman liked to make it up between them, I would put no spoke in the wheel.’

‘Phillis Holman!’ said Mr Holdsworth.  ’Is she the daughter of the minister-farmer out at Heathbridge?  Have I been helping on the course of true love by letting you go there so often?  I knew nothing of it.’

‘There is nothing to know,’ said I, more annoyed than I chose to show.  ’There is no more true love in the case than may be between the first brother and sister you may choose to meet.  I have been telling father she would never think of me; she’s a great deal taller and cleverer; and I’d rather be taller and more learned than my wife when I have one.’