As for Mrs. Joscelyn, her cheeks were pink all the evening after, and her eyes quite bright. “I have not had so much conversation for years. Dear, dear! how it does one good, after never seeing anybody that has ever opened a book, to get a good talk with a well-informed person! I hope Harry will take to Mr. Selby,” Mrs. Joscelyn cried; “what a chance for him, Joan! a man that really knows; and will give him such good advice--and so good for Liddy, too, when she comes home.” Joan acquiesced in all this, with a laugh.
“It was as good as a play to hear you,” she said, “and me gaping all the time, saying to myself, ‘I never knew mother had so much in her!’” At this Mrs Joscelyn drew herself up a little; but she was not displeased with the praise.
“I read a great deal when I was young,” she said. “Papa always insisted upon it. You have not had my advantages, Joan; but you have strong sense, my dear, which, perhaps, I never had.”
“I daresay I will do, mother,” said Joan, with another laugh. She admired her mother’s cleverness with a kind of amused delight; but the idea of being less valued than her mother did not enter Joan’s head. It made her laugh, with a comfortable sense of practical superiority. “I’ll do,” she repeated, smiling broadly, all the dimples showing in her cheeks. She had a good deal of colour. Mrs. Joscelyn’s fragile looks and elegant extracts were alike out of Joan’s way.
After this Mr. Philip Selby came several times. Joan always assisted at the interviews in the same pleased spectatorship. It occurred to her after a while that the information of the talkers was not very extensive. She seemed to hear the same names over and over again--almost the same remarks--which reduced Joan’s admiration, and made her feel that perhaps after all it was only a way they had, and did not imply the profound erudition she had admired so much: but still it was finer talk than anything she had heard before. Then Harry, came interrupting these elegant conversations. Harry did not think anything of them at all; he had no literary tastes any more than the rest of the family. He was not at all given to reading, and the consequence of Mrs. Joscelyn’s recommendation to him of Mr. Philip Selby, and his society, resulted in a strong dislike on Harry’s part to Mr. Selby, and desire never to see him again. Young Selby was Harry’s friend, a young man who was not good for very much; and he also had the strongest objection to his cousin. There had not been much heard of Mr. Selby while Harry was at the White House; but just after the luggage and the hamper had been sent off, and when peace had for a little while returned, he came to pay one of his usual visits. And perhaps it was that Mrs. Joscelyn was preoccupied; perhaps that Mr. Selby had something on his mind. The conversation flagged. Joan, who now never made any attempt to put by her knitting, and permitted her mother’s basket to exhibit its store of mending freely, took notice of a long pause that occurred in the talk, and she hastened to do what she could, in her straight-forward way, to fill up the gap.