But Oliver undertook the responsibility with a frankness and fearlessness which were their own defence. He assured Mrs. Polley that Miss ’Liza need take no harm from the perusal of good poetry, and pledged himself that, so far from causing her to neglect any duty, it ought rather to spur her on and brace her to its better performance. He smiled to himself after the utterance of so great a platitude, while the hint evaporated in empty air. It was poor Miss ’Liza who felt embarrassed. She had been accustomed to hear herself accused of literary tastes with an admixture of very mild vanity and rather more energetic deprecation. She was by no means sure that the tastes were sufficiently pronounced to stand the investigation of a university man. She fidgeted and hesitated, and caused ’Mily to mock her more than ever, when Oliver broached the word poetry to her. In addition, by common consent, in the light of compatibility of taste, ’Liza found Oliver Constable likely to be set aside by her family and friends as her ‘beau.’ He was in all probability coming after one of the sisters in his regular visits to the back parlour, and ’Liza was the one who struck her own set, at the first glance, as cut out for him. ’Liza was quite the girl to believe what everybody told her. And she was not without a sense of obligation to the world in general and to her sisters in particular, for handing over Oliver to her. She was struck by the disinterestedness of Ann and ’Mily, and she was flattered with the notion of a distinguished conquest on her own part. On the other hand, ’Liza Polley was not so simple as to suppose that her sisters were actuated entirely by generosity in their early withdrawal from any rivalry in her pretensions to Oliver Constable. Indeed, in spite of her literary bent, ’Liza was ready to agree with ’Mily in her sweeping assertion that Oliver was ‘a handsome gorilla of a duffer,’ who was always talking sense, or nonsense which was no better than sense, since it was past their comprehension, and who was constantly on the verge of lecturing them. ’Liza did not relish the imminent prospect of a lecture, however delicately administered, any more than ’Mily or Ann relished it. She had an uneasy consciousness that Oliver would consider her a humbug, since she had really hardly any more topics to talk over with him than her sisters could find. Above all, ’Liza knew in her inmost heart there were persons—young men—a young man whom, whoever the world might regard as well matched with her, she liked infinitely better than she could ever like Oliver Constable. Oliver was a great scholar, and she was not nearly scholarly enough to be at home with him as she was with that other person, who chaffed her unmercifully about being a blue-stocking, but who, she was sure, nevertheless, looked up to her a little for her slender bookish attainments. ’Liza dreaded that ‘the word of’ Oliver would separate her from this more favoured aspirant to her regard.