 over
the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing
his large white hands to much advantage, as Rosamond thought. »Do look at this
bridegroom coming out of church: did you ever see such a sugared invention - as
the Elizabethans used to say? Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking? Yet I
will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land.«
    »You are so severe, I am frightened at you,« said Rosamond, keeping her
amusement duly moderate. Poor young Plymdale had lingered with admiration over
this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.
    »There are a great many celebrated people writing in the Keepsake, at all
events,« he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid. »This is the first time I
have heard it called silly.«
    »I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth,« said
Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile. »I suspect you know nothing about
Lady Blessington and L.E.L.« Rosamond herself was not without relish for these
writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to
the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very
highest taste.
    »But Sir Walter Scott - I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him,« said young
Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage.
    »Oh, I read no literature now,« said Lydgate, shutting the book, and pushing
it away. »I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my
life. I used to know Scott's poems by heart.«
    »I should like to know when you left off,« said Rosamond, »because then I
might be sure that I knew something which you did not know.«
    »Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing,« said Mr. Ned, purposely
caustic.
    »On the contrary,« said Lydgate, showing no smart, but smiling with
exasperating confidence at Rosamond. »It would be worth knowing by the fact that
Miss Vincy could tell it me.«
    Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that Lydgate
was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been his
ill-fortune to meet.
    »How rash you are!« said Rosamond, inwardly delighted »Do you see that you
have given offence?«
    »What - is it Mr. Plymdale's book
