Chapter 20 - Page 2

merry-making than those in which it comported with the
tastes and habits of the present party to indulge. In vain Mrs.
Hawker, in her quiet dignified way, enjoyed the ready wit and
masculine thoughts of Mrs. Bloom field, appearing to renew her youth;
or, Eve, with her sweet simplicity, and highly cultivated mind and
improved tastes, seemed like a highly-polished mirror, to throw back
the flashes of thought and memory, that so constantly gleamed before
both; it was all lost on these thoroughly matter-of-fact
utilitarians. Mr. Effingham, all courtesy and mild refinement, was
seldom happier; and John Effingham was never more pleasant, for he
had laid aside the severity of his character, to appear, what he
ought always to have been, a man in whom intelligence and quickness
of thought could be made to seem secondary to the gentler qualities.
The young men were not behind their companions, either, each, in his
particular way, appearing to advantage, gay, regulated, and full of a
humour that was rendered so much the more agreeable, by drawing its
images from a knowledge of the world, that was tempered by
observation and practice.

Poor Grace, alone, was the only one of the whole party, always
excepting Aristabulus and Steadfast, who, for those fleeting but gay
hours, was not thoroughly happy. For the first time in her life, she
felt her own deficiencies, that ready and available knowledge, so
exquisitely feminine in its nature and exhibition, which escaped Mrs.
Bloomfield and Eve, as it might be from its own excess; which the
former possessed almost, intuitively, a gift of Heaven, and which the
latter enjoyed, not only from the same source, but as a just
consequence of her long and steady self-denial, application, and a
proper appreciation of her duty to herself, was denied one who, in
ill-judged compliance with the customs of a society that has no other
apparent aim than the love of display, had precluded herself from
enjoyments that none but the intellectual can feel. Still Grace was
beautiful and attractive; and though she wondered where her cousin,
in general so simple and unpretending, had acquired all those stores
of thought, that, in the _abandon_ and freedom of such a fête,
escaped her in rich profusion, embellished with ready allusions and a
brilliant though chastened wit, her generous and affectionate heart
could permit her to wonder without envying. She perceived, for the
first time, on this occasion, that if Eve were indeed a Hajji, it was
not a Hajji of a common school; and, while her modesty and self-
abasement led her bitterly to regret the hours irretrievably wasted
in the frivolous levities so common to those of her sex with whom she
had been most accustomed to mingle, her sincere regret did