“Charlie is so handsome,” said Marian laughing, as they all turned a corner, and, emancipated from the public observation, ran along the quiet street, a straggling group, one now pressing before, and now lagging behind. This big boy, however, so far from being handsome, was strikingly the opposite. He had large, loose, ill-compacted limbs, like most young animals of a large growth, and a face which might be called clever, powerful, or good-humoured, but certainly was, without any dispute, ugly. He was of dark complexion, had natural furrows in his brow, and a mouth, wide with fun and happy temper at the present moment, which could close with indomitable obstinacy when occasion served. No fashion could have made Charlie Atheling fashionable; but his plain apparel looked so much plainer and coarser than his sisters’, that it had neither neatness nor grace to redeem its homeliness. He was seventeen, tall, _big_, and somewhat clumsy, as unlike as possible to the girls, who had a degree of natural and simple gracefulness not very common in their sphere. Charlie’s masculine development was unequivocal; he was a thorough _boy_ now, and would be a manful man. “Charlie, boy, have you been thinking?” asked Agnes suddenly, as the three once more relapsed into a sober pace, and pursued their homeward way together. There was the faintest quiver of ridicule in the elder sister’s voice, and Marian looked up for the answer with a smile. The young gentleman gave some portentous hitches of his broad shoulders, twisted his brow into ominous puckers, set his teeth--and at last burst out with indignation and unrestrained vehemence-- “Have I been thinking?--to be sure! but I can’t make anything of it, if I think for ever.” “You are worse than a woman, Charlie,” said the pretty Marian; “you never can make up your mind.” “Stuff!” cried the big boy loudly; “it isn’t making up my mind, it’s thinking what will do. You girls know nothing about it. I can’t see that one thing’s better than another, for my part. One man succeeds and another man’s a failure, and yet the one’s as good a fellow and as clever to work as the other. I don’t know what it means.” “So I suppose you will end with being misanthropical and doing nothing,” said Agnes; “and all Charlie Atheling’s big intentions will burst, like Beau’s soap-bubbles. I would not have that.” “I won’t have that, and so you know very well,” said Charlie, who was by no means indisposed for a quarrel. “You are always aggravating, you girls--as if you knew anything about it! I’ll tell you what; I don’t mind how it is, but I’m a man to be something, as sure as I live.” “You are not a man at all, poor little Charlie--you are only a boy,” said Marian. “And we are none of us so sure to live that we should swear by it,” said Agnes. “If you are to be something, you should speak better sense than that.”