Harry Stanhope was not so egregiously foolish in his vanity as to fail to penetrate the fashion in which Catherine Hilliard was taking stock of him, weighing him in the balance, and finding him hugely wanting. ‘Look here, Horry,’ he protested, thrusting his fingers through his fair hair in comical discomfiture, after an hour’s compulsory companionship with Catherine, ‘that girl has been looking at me through a microscope, and picking holes in my credit all the evening; she knows not only how I was ploughed in my smalls, but all about that time I was rusticated for the beastly row at Walsh’s, though I never told her a word of the mess. I say, I wish the old woman’ (an irreverent reference to Mrs. Hilliard, to which the lady would not have objected in the least) ‘would not persist in pairing us off together. It is no go; though no doubt Miss Hilliard’s tin might be of use in the farm, she would not have a gift of me, and unfortunately I could not get the tin without offering my precious self in exchange.’ ‘Ain’t she more the style we’ve been accustomed to—I mean among our people—than Miss Constable, for instance?’ enquired Horry, doubtfully, of his oracle. ‘I think Miss Hilliard is rather a fine girl; looks like a lady without making a fuss about it.’ ‘True, oh king! She is stately in her stiffness as a stage duchess. And she is a sap as well as a swell. I bet you she reads as hard as old Herculaneum, not that she ever alluded to a book to me, except to one of Lever’s stories, which she just mentioned tentatively, with great scrutinising eyes fixed upon me, the better to assure herself that it was something in my line. But I have glimpses of the old beggars the English poets, and so forth, if not of the Greek and Latin humbugs, in the turn of her neck and the wave of her hair; I am in constant horror lest she should so far forget herself as put me through my exams again—which line in “Paradise Lost” I prefer, or whether I agree with Bacon that gunpowder ought to have been invented before lucifers. I don’t think I can stand it much longer if Mrs. Hilliard will go on acting as if we were made for each other, though I am prepared to own that Miss Hilliard is innocent of any pretence in the matter. How could it be otherwise when she is so stunningly wise and learned, and the rest of it? Oh! I say, when you see all that, and the knowledge don’t crush you, suppose you go in for the lady and the tin, to be ploughed and harrowed into the dirty acres of Copley Grange Farm, and so relieve your brother-officer of the obligation, Horatio?’