His heart
beat loud in his ears. "I've made her mad with me," he said to
himself, using the old rustic school-boy vernacular, from which he
did not always depart in his thoughts, although his ministerial
dignity guarded his conversations. Thomas Merriam came of a simple
homely stock, whose speech came from the emotions of the heart, all
unregulated by the usages of the schools. He was the first for
generations who had aspired to college learning and a profession, and
had trained his tongue by the models of the educated and polite. He
could not help, at times, the relapse of his thoughts, and their
speaking to himself in the dialect of his family and his ancestors.
"She's 'way above me, and I ought to ha' known it," he further said,
with the meekness of an humble but fiercely independent race, which
is meek to itself alone. He would have maintained his equality with
his last breath to an opponent; in his heart of hearts he felt
himself below the scion of the one old gentle family of his native
village.
This young Evelina, by the fine dignity which had been born with her
and not acquired by precept and example, by the sweetly formal
diction which seemed her native tongue, had filled him with awe. Now,
when he thought she was angered with him, he felt beneath her lady
feet, his nostrils choked with a spiritual dust of humiliation.
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