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RETROSPECTIVE
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handsome and agreeable. To a girl who has been educated to teach, whose whole girlish life has been spent in what is to be useful to her in after life in the seclusion of a boarding-school, who has never been initiated in all the light playful talk, half flirtation, half raillery, that breaks the boundary line between jest and earnest, the first attentions of a disengaged and eligible young gentleman are very likely to be successful. Miss Hope could not detect in the son who was to inherit the fortune the tone of underbreeding too apparent in he father who had acquired it. An Oxford course and a continental tour were correctives that in her opinion could not fail to make him a perfect gentleman; and as he had not hitherto been much in ladies' society, Miss Hope's liveliness, Miss Hope's perfect knowledge of her position, Miss Hope's tact in falling into everybody's ways and never offending or displeasing any one, Miss Hope's playing and singing, especially to the harp, Miss Hope's very handsome face and figure and good style of dress, were working wonders. John Derrick thought her a famous girl with plenty of life, or as he called it of go in her, and he flirted with her on every convenient opportunity, but still with discretion, for his father and mother never suspected anything of it.