Benson was gone, and Ashburner stayed. Why? He had been at Oldport nearly a month; the place was not particularly beautiful, and the routine of amusements not at all to his taste. Why did he stay? He had his secret, too.
It is a melancholy but indisputable fact, that even in the most religious and moral country in the world, the bulwark of evangelical faith, and the home of the domestic virtues (meaning, of course, England), a great many mothers who have daughters to marry, are not so anxious about the real welfare, temporal and eternal, of their young ladies, as solicitous that they should acquire riches, titles, and other vanities of the world,--nay, that many of the daughters themselves act as if their everlasting happiness depended on their securing in matrimony a proper combination of the aforesaid vanities, and put out of account altogether the greatest prize a woman can gain--the possession of a true and loving heart, joined to a wise head. Now, Ashburner being a very good _parti_ at home, and having run the gauntlet of one or two London seasons, had become very skittish of mammas, and still more so of daughters. He regarded the unmarried female as a most dangerous and altogether to be avoided animal, and when you offered to introduce him to a young lady, looked about as grateful as if you had invited him to go up in a balloon. He expected to be rather more persecuted, if any thing, in America than he had been at home; and when he met Miss Vanderlyn at Ravenswood, if his first thought had found articulate expression, it would probably have been something like this:--"Now that young woman is going to set her cap at me; what a bore it will be!"