Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. I, 1866.djvu/130

120 But she is doubtless returned now, and will presently come and pour out tea for us."

"Thank you; I'll stay," said Felix, not from any curiosity to see the minister's daughter, but from a liking for the society of the minister himself—for his quaint looks and ways, and the transparency of his talk, which gave a charm even to his weaknesses. The daughter was probably some prim Miss, neat, sensible, pious, but all in a small feminine way, in which Felix was no more interested than in Dorcas meetings, biographies of devout women, and that amount of ornamental knitting which was not inconsistent with Nonconforming seriousness.

"I'm perhaps a little too fond of banging and smashing," he went on; "a phrenologist at Glasgow told me I had large veneration; another man there, who knew me, laughed out and said I was the most blasphemous iconoclast living. 'That,' says my phrenologist, 'is because of his large Ideality, which prevents him from finding anything perfect enough to be venerated.' Of course I put my ears down and wagged my tail at that stroking."

"Yes, yes; I have had my own head explored with somewhat similar results. It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, 'Know