Why shouldn't he make up to the Jedge's daughter? She
was genteel enough for him, and--let's see, haow old was she?
Seven-'n'itwenty,--no, six-'n'-twenty,--born the same year we buried our
little Anny Marl".
There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But "Portia,"
as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not happen to awaken
the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met her once in a
while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen of the grand
style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a woman not quite
so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in her
speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or three more
joints in her frame, and two or three soft inflections in her voice,
which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so
bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes
all that he could not tell, in less time than it would have takes him to
discuss the champion paper of the last Quarterly with the admirable
"Portia.
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