was not that she had evinced any determination to refuse the tender of Mr. Sowerby's hand, but she was so painfully resolute not to have dust thrown in her eyes! Mrs. Harold Smith had commenced with a mind fixed upon avoiding what she called humbug; but this sort of humbug had become so prominent a part of her usual rhetoric, that she found it very hard to abandon it.
"And that's what I wish," said she. "Of course, my chief object is to secure my brother's happiness."
"That's very unkind to poor Mr. Harold Smith."
"Well, well, well—you know what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do know what you mean. Your brother is a gentleman of good family, but of no means."
"Not quite so bad as that."
"Of embarrassed means, then, or any thing that you will; whereas I am a lady of no family, but of sufficient wealth. You think that if you brought us together and made a match of it, it would be a very good thing for—for whom?" said Miss Dunstable.
"Yes, exactly," said Mrs. Harold Smith.
"For which of us? Remember the bishop now and his nice little bit of Latin."
"For Nathaniel then," said Mrs. Harold Smith, boldly. "It would be a very good thing for him." And a slight smile came across her face as she said it. "Now that's honest, or the mischief is in it."
"Yes, that's honest enough. And did he send you here to tell me this?"
"Well, he did that, and something else."
"And now let's have the something else. The really important part, I have no doubt, has been spoken."
"No, by no means—by no means all of it. But you are so hard on one, my dear, with your running after honesty, that one is not able to tell the real facts as they are. You make one speak in such a bald, naked way."
"Ah! you think that any thing naked must be indecent—even truth."
"I think it is more proper-looking, and better suited, too, for the world's work, when it goes about with some sort of a garment on it. We are so used to a leaven of falsehood in all we hear and say, nowadays, that nothing is more likely to deceive us than the absolute truth. If a shopkeeper told me that his wares were simply middling,
