Until that northern winter embraced and hardened him, quickening mind
and soul and body, crowding the future with realized dreams, he never
had dared to imagine that life could be so fair and beautiful a thing.
On stormy winter nights, when he roasted chestnuts or popped corn in the
great fireplace of Liberty Hall, under the tuition of all the Livingston
girls, Sarah, Susan, Kitty, and Judith, he felt very sociable indeed;
and if his ears, sometimes, were soundly boxed, he looked so penitent
and meek that he was contritely rewarded with the kiss he had snatched.
The girls regarded him as a cross between a sweet and charming boy to be
spoiled--one night, when he had a toothache, they all sat up with
him--and a phenomenon of nature of which they stood a trifle in awe. But
the last was when he was not present and they fell to discussing him.
And with them, as with all women, he wore, because to the gay vivacity
and polished manners of his Gallic inheritance he added the rugged
sincerity of the best of Britons; and in the silences of his heart he
was too sensible of the inferiority of the sex, out of which, first and
last, he derived so much pleasure, not to be tender and considerate of
it always.
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