The Atlantic Monthly, page 139 by Various Authors
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observer might often be deceived, by failing to give her credit for certain good qualities which are commonly coexistent with worldliness,--especially in a woman. There was a spice of something better latent amid her shrewdness and hard-headed sagacity; the echo of more generous aspirations lingered through all the noise of this earth's Babel in her heart. And so, when she heard of Everett's resolve to pay his father's debts by parting with the property, her better and higher nature warmed to the young man; and though she protested against his Quixotism, and frowned, and talked of prudence, and so forth, her busy brain was, in fact, all the while setting itself to work for his benefit. She was, in a way, fond of the young man. No woman is quite insensible to that chivalrous deference which a Visionary like Everett always manifests to womanhood, collective and individual. And though she certainly held him to be rash, foolish, unfit to deal with the world, "poetical," (a capital crime in her eyes,) and dreamy, she yet liked him, and was glad to discover a plan whereby the objections to his marriage with her daughter, under the present adverse circumstances, might be smoothed away.
She was sitting at her big desk, strewn with accounts, in the sober-looking library where she always spent her mornings, and she rose to receive her prospective son-in-law, with an aspect serious and business-like, yet not stern.
"Well, my dear Everett, what is all this that I hear about you? A very, very sad affair, of course; but you must come and tell me how you intend to act. Yes, yes,--I've heard something about it; but I don't quite understand the state of the case. I want to have a talk with you."
And she leaned her comely face upon her plump, white hand, while gravely listening to Everett's brief statement of what he had already done, and what were his plans for the future.
"You will sell Hazlewood, pay your father's debts, and begin life on your own account, by going to Canada and becoming a merchant's