Kendal as the likeness to their little Maurice,
though it consisted more in air and gesture than in feature. His
speech was brief and to the point, softened into delicately-polished
courtesy towards womankind, in the condescension of strength to
weakness--the quality he evidently thought their chief characteristic.
Albinia was amused as she watched him with grown-up eyes, and
compared present with past impressions. She could now imagine that
she had been an inconvenient charge to a young soldier brother, and
that he had been glad to make her over to the aunts, only petting and
indulging her as a child; looking down on her fancies, and smiling at
her sauciness when she was an enthusiastic maiden--treatment which
she had so much resented, that she had direfully offended Maurice by
pronouncing William a mere martinet, when she was hurt at his neither
reading the Curse of Kehama, nor entering into her plans for Fairmead
school.
Having herself become a worker, she could better appreciate a man who
had seen and acted instead of reading, recollected herself as an
emanation of conceit, and felt shy and anxious, even more for her
husband than for herself. How would the scholar and the soldier fare
together? and could she and Maurice keep them from wearying of each
other? She had little trust in her own fascinations, though she saw
the General's eye approvingly fixed on her, and believing herself to
be a more pleasing object in her womanly bloom than in her unformed
girlhood.
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