"I am right glad you have come," he said. And as he saw her going to the bookshelf, he continued, with diffidence: "As regyards that Emma book, yu' see—yu' see, the doin's and sayin's of folks like them are above me. But I think" (he spoke most diffidently), "if yu' could read me something that was about something, I—I'd be liable to keep awake." And he smiled with a certain shyness.
"Something about something?" queried Molly, at a loss.
"Why, yes. Shakespeare. Henry the Fourth. The British king is fighting, and there is his son the prince. He cert'nly must have been a jimdandy boy if that is all true. Only he would go around town with a mighty triflin' gang. They sported and they held up citizens. And his father hated his travelling with trash like them. It was right natural—the boy and the old man! But the boy showed himself a man too. He killed a big fighter on the other side who was another jimdandy—and he was sorry for having it to do." The Virginian warmed to his recital. "I understand most all of that. There was a fat man kept everybody laughing. He was awful natural too; except yu' don't commonly meet 'em so fat. But the prince—that play is bed-rock, ma'am! Have you got something like that?"
"Yes, I think so," she replied. "I believe I see what you would appreciate."
She took her Browning, her idol, her imagined affinity. For the pale decadence of New England had somewhat watered her good old Revolutionary blood too, and she was inclined to think under
