soon as ever they press for anything tangible, he will send Captain Lovelace adrift, he only wants to gain time.)
Our faces express even more amazement than delight. We had so confidently reckoned on a violent scene, an unseemly exodus, and, behold! . . . . We all tumble backwards over each other, as the door opens, and her victorious sweetheart comes out, and catches her up in his arms like a baby, and what happens next I don't know, for we all scamper away like mad.
For many a day papa's face is black as ink, and he surveys Alice with a wonderfully equal mixture of scorn, impatience, and wrath, as though he found her a most indelicate and unpleasant spectacle.
It is very strange that fathers who fell in love so naturally and comfortably when they were young, should so bitterly resent, and feel so utterly disgusted at their children's doing the same. If he had his way he would keep all his daughters withering for ever on their virgin stalks, and when they were miserable peaky old maids turn round upon them, and twit them with their incapacity to get a man to marry either of them.
For the first time in my life I am in a position to critically study the ways, looks, and words of a real handsome young pair of lovers. (I think all lovers should be young and good-looking: I can't fancy faded or elderly people peering into each other's dull faces.) I should not have so much opportunity, but that, after patient and dispassionate trial of all her elder brothers and sisters as gooseberries, she has fixed her choice upon me, as being the sharpest, most unseeming and most unhearing of the lot, and fully one-half my time is spent in boudoir, garden, or summer-house, craning my neck round corners, in anxious watch against the governor.
Charles Lovelace is supposed to pay two or three decorous visits a week, and sit in the drawing-room opposite Alice, with mother
