Jimps looks at it forty
times in every five minutes and I can't blame him. Mr. Jefferson keeps
his chair facing that way so he can have her all the time in focus,
though he doesn't eat her up as Jimps does. I can't blame either of
them. And I shall go on being a clown, because that's what I can do and
it amuses them. If I should lie back in a chair like that and just smile
without saying anything, Father Davy would say, 'Daughter, don't you
feel quite well?' and Jimps would propose getting me a cup of tea. Oh,
well--how absurd of me to mind because another girl looks like a picture
by a wonderful painter while I look like--a lurid lithograph by nobody
at all!"

Whereupon she set her strong, white teeth into a hot, roasted chestnut,
cracked it, and, regarding the halves, said: "This reminds me of the
night Prexy lost his head"--and brought down the house with the merriest
tale of all. It was so irresistibly absurd that Jeannette, helpless with
her mirth, buried her face in her cobweb handkerchief, Stuart rocked
upon his knees and made the welkin ring, and Mr. Jefferson laughed in a
growling bass that gathered volume as the preposterousness of the
situation grew upon him with consideration of it. Even Mr. Warne, whose
expressions of amusement were usually noiseless, gave way to soft little
chuckles of appreciation, and wiped his tear-filled eyes.

Georgiana, finishing her chestnut, looked upon them all and told them
they were the most gratifying audience she had ever addressed, but that
she feared it was not good for them to give way to their emotions so
unrestrainedly, and that she should therefore not open her lips again
that night. As they found it impossible to break down this resolution,
even with entreaties backed by offerings of worldly goods, the party
broke up. Georgiana carried off her guest to put her to bed with her own
hands, while Mr. Jefferson and James Stuart smoked a bedtime pipe
together in the boarder's room; after which Stuart let himself quietly
out of a door that was never locked, to reflect, as he tramped homeward
over the snow, on what an inordinately jolly evening it had been.

CHAPTER VIII

SOAPSUDS

"Will you think I'm dreadful, Georgiana dear," asked Jeannette, lying
luxuriously back upon her pillow while her cousin sat braiding her own
thick locks by the little bedroom fireplace in which the last remnants
of the fire were smouldering, "if I say I shouldn't have believed I
could