“I was so much diverted at church,” said the young lady, in the flippant manner which she mistook for wit, “I was so much diverted to see you looking so seriously at the inscription upon your own monument. It was so funny, I could hardly help bursting out laughing, only that would have been very improper, you know.”
“The inscription made me feel anything but inclined to laugh,” observed Ernest.
“Well, I would give the world,”—had the world belonged to Clementina, she would have given it away ten times a-day,—“I would give the world to know what you were thinking when you read those fine verses upon yourself.”
“I was thinking whether it would indeed have been happier for me to have died when I was a little one, before I had known anything of the world and sin.”
“Oh, dear me! those are the dreadful, gloomy notions which you get from your horrid, methodistical tutor.”
“Clementina, I will not hear him spoken of in that manner,” said Ernest, with a decision of tone which the young lady had never heard him make use of before. She was either offended, or thought it pretty to look so, for stopping as they reached a very low stile, she called to Charles to help her over it. She wished to vex Ernest, and raise a feeling of jealousy toward his brother; but she was successful in neither of her designs, as Ernest very contentedly turned back to Mr. Ewart, and left the fair lady to pursue her walk with the companion whom she had chosen.
“I am so sorry for you, dear Charles!” said Clementina, in a voice rather more affected than usual; “it is so dreadful to be turned out of your right by a low, vulgar creature like that.”
“But you see I don’t think him either low or vulgar,” replied Charles, good humouredly. “He has high feelings, and high principles; and as for being vulgar, a boy who thinks so much, and upon such subjects as he does, can never, as Mr. Ewart said to me once, have a vulgar mind.”
“I find him intolerably dull,” said Clementina.
“I am sorry for it,” was her cousin’s dry reply.
Clementina was now offended with Charles in his turn, and had there been a third party less unmanageable than Mr. Ewart, she would doubtless have chosen him to accompany her, in the delightful hope of annoying both her cousins. The silly girl was almost unconsciously forming a plan to separate the brothers, and make them jealous of each other, by sometimes favouring the elder, sometimes the younger, so as to draw their whole attention towards herself. You may think that it was some unkind and bitter feeling that made her wish thus to destroy their happiness and union, and act the part of a tempter towards her companions; but it was nothing but selfish vanity and folly—so that she was amused, she cared not who suffered; the power to give pain she considered as a triumph—it is reckoned so in Vanity Fair.