Second Appearance of Jicks

FIVE more days passed.

During that interval¹, we saw our new neighbor constantly. Either Oscar came to the rectory, or we went to Browndown. Reverend Finch² waited, with a masterly assumption of suspecting nothing, until the relations between the two young people were ripe enough to develop into relations of acknowledged love. They were already (under Lucilla’s influence) advancing rapidly to that point. You are not to blame my poor blind girl, if you please, for frankly³ encouraging the man she loved. He was the most backward man — viewed as a suitor — whom I ever met with. The fonder he grew of her, the more timid and self-distrustful he became. I own I don’t like a modest man; and I cannot honestly say that Mr. Oscar Dubourg, on closer acquaintance, advanced himself much in my estimation. However, Lucilla understood him, and that was enough. She was determined⁴ to have the completest possible image of him in her mind. Everybody in the house who had seen him (the children included) she examined and cross-examined on the subject of his personal appearance, as she had already examined and cross-examined me. His features and his color, his height and his breadth; his ornaments⁵ and his clothes — on all these points she collected evidence, in every direction and in the smallest detail. It was an especial relief and delight to her to hear, on all sides, that his complexion⁶ was fair. There was no reasoning with her against her blind horror of dark shades of color, whether seen in men, women, or things. She was quite unable to account for it; she could only declare it.

“I have the strangest instincts of my own about some things,” she said to me one day. “For instance, I knew that Oscar was bright and fair — I mean I felt it in myself — on that delightful⁷ evening when I first heard the sound of his voice. It went straight from my ear to my heart; and it described him, just as the rest of you have described him to me since. Mrs. Finch tells me his complexion is

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