Page:Gaskell - North and South, vol. II, 1855.djvu/326

 enthusiasm about high subjects in company, and never thought about them when they were alone; they squandered their capabilities of appreciation into a mere flow of appropriate words. One day, after the gentlemen had come up into the drawing-room, Mr. Lennox drew near to Margaret, and addressed her in almost the first voluntary words he had spoken to her since she had returned to live in Harley Street.

"You did not look pleased at what Shirley was saying at dinner."

"Didn't I? My face must be very expressive," replied Margaret.

"It always was. It has not lost the trick of being eloquent."

"I did not like," said Margaret, hastily, "his way of advocating what he knew to be wrong—so glaringly wrong—even in jest."

"But it was very clever. How every word told! Do you remember the happy epithets?"

"Yes."

"And despise them, you would like to add. Pray don't scruple, though he is my friend."

"There! that is the exact tone in you, that"— she stopped short.

He listened for a moment to see if she would finish her sentence; but she only reddened, and turned away; before she did so, however, she heard him say, in a very low, clear voice,—

"If my tones, or modes of thought, are what you dislike, will you do me the justice to tell me so, and so give me the chance of learning to please you?"

All these weeks there was no intelligence of Mr. Bell's going to Milton. He had spoken of it at