Barrington. Volume 1. Lever Charles James
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Название: Barrington. Volume 1
Автор: Lever Charles James
Издательство: Public Domain
Жанр: Зарубежная классика
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“Here’s her health, – in a bumper too!” cried Conyers.
“Hurray, hurray!” shouted out Tom, as he tossed off his full glass, and set it on the table with a bang that smashed it. “Oh, I beg pardon! I didn’t mean to break the tumbler.”
“Never mind it, Dill; it’s a trifle. I half hoped you had done it on purpose, so that the glass should never be drained to a less honored toast. Is she like you?”
“Like me, – like me?” asked he, coloring deeply. “Polly like me?”
“I mean is there a family resemblance? Could you be easily known as brother and sister?”
“Not a bit of it. Polly is the prettiest girl in this county, and she ‘s better than she ‘s handsome. There’s nothing she can’t do. I taught her to tie flies, and she can put wings on a green-drake now that would take in any salmon that ever swam. Martin Keene sent her a pound-note for a book of ‘brown hackles,’ and, by the way, she gave it to me. And if you saw her on the back of a horse! – Ambrose Bushe’s gray mare, the wickedest devil that ever was bridled, one buck jump after another the length of a field, and the mare trying to get her head between her fore-legs, and Polly handling her so quiet, never out of temper, never hot, but always saying, ‘Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, Dido? Don’t you see them all laughing at us?’”
“I am quite curious to see her. Will you present me one of these days?”
Tom mumbled out something perfectly unintelligible.
“I hope that I may be permitted to make her acquaintance,” repeated he, not feeling very certain that his former speech was quite understood.
“Maybe so,” grumbled he out at last, and sank back in his chair with a look of sulky ill-humor; for so it was that poor Tom, in his ignorance of life and its ways, deemed the proposal one of those free-and-easy suggestions which might be made to persons of very inferior station, and to whom the fact of acquaintanceship should be accounted as a great honor.
Conyers was provoked at the little willingness shown to meet his offer, – an offer he felt to be a very courteous piece of condescension on his part, – and now both sat in silence. At last Tom Dill, long struggling with some secret impulse, gave way, and in a tone far more decided and firm than heretofore, said, “Maybe you think, from seeing what sort of a fellow I am, that my sister ought to be like me; and because I have neither manners nor education, that she ‘s the same? But listen to me now; she ‘s just as little like me as you are yourself. You ‘re not more of a gentleman than she’s a lady!”
“I never imagined anything else.”
“And what made you talk of bringing her up here to present her to you, as you called it? Was she to be trotted out in a cavasin, like a filly?”
“My dear fellow,” said Conyers, good-humoredly, “you never made a greater mistake. I begged that you would present me to your sister. I asked the sort of favor which is very common in the world, and in the language usually employed to convey such a request. I observed the recognized etiquette – ”
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