Ethel Freeman.
��91
��manners, and not without ability. But Mrs. Reed unequivocall}' and emphatically disliked him ; and on her husband's telling her that Freeman had asked their daughter's hand of him, she expressed her feelings in the foregoing decisive terms.
Mr. Reed was one of those easy- going husbands, who, whenever family questions involving responsibility are at issue, always seek refuge behind the irresponsible aphorism, "I wish to avoid all domestic disturbances." So, on this occasion, having said his say, he remarked uneasily, "Well, well, mother, you and Ethel can set- tle it between you," and left the room.
II.
Ethel Reed inherited both her mother's chivalrous faith in the high- est manhood and womanhood, and somewhat Utopian tenets regarding marriage, and her father's practical sense and pertinacity of purpose. It was natural to her to invest those she cared for with ideal, ennobling quali- ties ; but duties devolving upon her from having too fully accepted as genuine that which was only imag- inary she would never seek to evade should disillusion come too late to her. Her mother, knowing this, was the more acutely sensitive to the fore- boded consequences of the proposed marriage. She knew well the folly of direct opposition. She must pro- ceed cautiously, yet at once, and she decided to consider carefully her ar- guments, and present them in unas- sailable array to Ethel, trusting to the latter's strong sense and practical views to be convinced, and to sub- mit.
Ethel was extremely beautiful to
��look upon. Her beauty, it must be confessed, was the greatest fascina- tion she possessed, for she was neither brilliant nor very accomplished nor strikingly talented in any special direction. "I want my daughter above all things to be womanly," her father had said. "I want neither a musical genius, nor a literary genius, nor an artistical genius, nor a curi- osity of any sort." So Ethel knew a little of various arts and vanities commonly termed accomplishments, but was thoroughly domestic in her tastes, while her housewifely ways were of the sort most men prize after marriage, if not so likely as more showy traits to attract regard be- fore.
But her remarkable beauty had thus far proven a sufliciently power- ful magnet, and though it be some- what out of date to give the portrait of the heroine, yet as every one who knew P^thel was consciously or un- consciously greatly influenced by her looks, they seemed so essentially an element of her very personality, that it is manifestly desirable to describe her. She was tall, slender, straight, but of well-rounded figure, and lithe- some as a willow wand. Her head, beautifully shaped and well set on a slender, graceful neck, was adorned with abundant masses of black hair of that rare quality that seems to emit a soft sheen with every changing light. Her eyes were large and black, and possessed a peculiar soft- ness and shyness, and long, thick lashes added to this effect ; — one of her admirers not inaptly compared them to deep lakes in the darkness of a thick-leaved wood. She had a brilliant brunette complexion, the
�� �
