"As far as the colour of my hair goes," replied Elinor, with a smile which seemed to say, talk on, I have no feeling on the subject of my plain face. One or two persons present had actually paused, thinking the conversation was taking an unfortunate turn, as one of the ladies present was undeniably wanting in beauty. To encourage the natural pursuit of the subject, Elinor remarked that, "light hair and decidedly blue eyes, like Mrs. St. Leger's, are not so very common, certainly; nor true black hair and eyes like your's, Jane."
"You are almost as much given to compliments, Miss Wyllys, as I am," said Mrs. Creighton; "I have to say a saucy thing now and then, by way of variety."
"The saucy speeches are for your own satisfaction, no doubt, and the compliments for that of your friends, I suppose," replied Elinor, smiling a little archly; for she had very good reasons for mistrusting the sincerity of either mode of speech from the lips of the gay widow; whom, for that very reason, she liked much less than her brother.
"Do you really think me too severe?--wait till we are better acquainted!"
"I shall always think you very charming," replied Elinor, with her usual frank smile; for, in fact, she admired Mrs. Creighton quite as much as the rest of the world. And then observing that Mr. Ellsworth was listening to their conversation, she turned to him and asked, if the true golden hair, so much admired by the Italian poets, and so often sung by them, were still common in Italy?
"Judging from books and pictures, I should think it must have been much more common some centuries ago than at the present day; for, certainly, there is not one Italian woman in a hundred, who has not very decidedly black hair and eyes. I remember once in a translation from English into Italian, I used the expression 'grey eyes,' which diverted my master very much: he insisted upon it, there was no 'such thing in nature;' and even after I had reminded him of Napoleon, he would not believe the Emperor's eyes were not black. He was a thorough Italian, of course, and knew nothing of the northern languages, or he would have met with the expression before."
"Let me tell you, Ellsworth," said Harry, after a short pause in the conversation, "that it is very pleasant to pass an agreeable evening in this way, chatting with old friends. You have no idea how much I enjoy it after a three years' exile!"
"I can readily believe it."
"No, I don't think you understand it at all. It is true you were roving about the world several years, but you were not alone, my dear sir. You had indeed the advantage of particularly agreeable companions with you: in Paris you had Mrs. Creighton, and in Egypt you had your humble servant. And then, in the next place, your mind was constantly occupied; you lived with the past while in Italy and Greece, and with the present in Paris. Now, at Rio, there is no past at all, and not much of a present."
"Is there no general society at Rio?" inquired Miss Wyllys.
"Oh, yes; society enough, in the usual meaning of the word. I was very fortunate in meeting with some very agreeable people, and have really a strong regard for Manezes {sic}--a good fellow he is, and I hope to see him here one of these days. But they were all new acquaintances. You cannot think how much I wanted to see a face I had known all my life; I was positively at one time on the verge of being home-sick."
"You found out that you were more tender-hearted than you had believed yourself," said Mr. Ellsworth.
"So it seems," replied Harry; a shade of embarrassment crossing his face as he spoke.
"I should have thought some old acquaintance or other would have gone straggling towards Rio, in these travelling days," observed Mr. Ellsworth.
"No, I was particularly unfortunate: once when the American squadron lay at Rio for some weeks, and I had several friends on board the Macedonian, I happened at that very time to be absent on an excursion in the interior. For six months, or so it did very well; it takes one as long as that to enjoy the lovely scenery, to say nothing of the novelty; but after admiring the bay and the Corcovado under every possible aspect, I got at last to be heartily tired of Rio. I should have run away, if we had not been recalled this summer."
{"Macedonian" = a United States warship, commanded during the early 1840s by Commodore William Branford Shubrick (1790-1874), a life-long close friend of James Fenimore Cooper. Susan Fenimore Cooper wrote a biography of him in 1876; "Corcovado" = a famous mountain peak overlooking the bay of Rio de Janeiro}
"You should have fallen in love," said Mrs. Creighton.
"I don't think I succeeded in that; perhaps I did not try very hard."
"But is not the state of society pleasant at Rio?" inquired Mr. Wyllys.
"Not particularly, sir; it is too much like our own for that; something provincial lingering about it, although they have an emperor of their own. We cannot do without the other hemisphere yet, in spite of our self-important airs. We Yankees have coaxed Time out of a great deal, but he is not to be cheated for all that. People were not busy for thousands of years in the Old World, merely to qualify them for discovering America, whatever some of our patriots may say on the subject."
"Yes, you are right, Harry; I have often wished that our people would remember what they seem to forget, that Time has a prerogative beyond their reach. There is a wide difference between a blind reverence for Time, and an infatuated denial of his power; and I take it to be one of the duties of your generation to find out the dividing line in this and other points, and shape your practice accordingly."
