Page:Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp Volume 1.djvu/19

Rh heap, making the fanciful collection fly in every direction over the carpet. "Ah! I believe now in this bonbon-box I did put them. Take care of your head, Harry!" And, with the word, the gilded missile flew from the little hand, and, opening on the way, showered Harry with a profusion of crumpled papers. "Now you have got them all, except one, that I- used for curl-papers, the other night. O, don't look so sober about it! Indeed, I kept the pieces—here they are. And now don't you say, Harry, don't you tell me that I never save my bills. You don't know how particular I have been, and what trouble I have taken. But, there—there's a letter Clayton wrote to me, one time when we had a quarrel. Just a specimen of that creature!"

"Pray, tell us about it, Miss Nina," said the young man, with his eyes fixed admiringly on the little person, while he was smoothing and arranging the crumpled documents.

"Why, you see, it was just this way. You know, these men—how provoking they are! They'll go and read all sorts of books—no matter what they read!—and then they are so dreadfully particular about us girls. Do you know, Harry, this always made me angry?

"Well, so, you see, one evening, Sophy Elliot quoted some poetry from Don Juan,—I never read it, but it seems folks call it a bad book,—and my lord Clayton immediately fixed his eyes upon her in such an appalling way, and says, 'Have you read Don Juan, Miss Elliot?' Then, you know, as girls always do in such cases, she blushed and stammered, and said her brother had read some extracts from it to her. I was vexed, and said, 'And, pray, what's the harm if she did read it? I mean to read it, the very first chance I get!'

"O! everybody looked so shocked. Why, dear me! if I had said I was going to commit murder, Clayton could not have looked more concerned. So he put on that very edifying air of his, and said, 'Miss Nina, I trust, as your friend, that you will not read that book. I should lose all respect for a lady friend who had read that.'