Not one, however, of all the friends whom
Ernest had been inveigled into trying to inveigle had shown the least
sign of being so far struck with Charlotte's commanding powers, as to
wish to make them his own, and this may have had something to do with the
rapidity and completeness with which Christina had dismissed them one
after another and had wanted a new one.
And now she wanted Towneley. Ernest had seen this coming and had tried
to avoid it, for he knew how impossible it was for him to ask Towneley,
even if he had wished to do so.
Towneley belonged to one of the most exclusive sets in Cambridge, and was
perhaps the most popular man among the whole number of undergraduates. He
was big and very handsome--as it seemed to Ernest the handsomest man whom
he ever had seen or ever could see, for it was impossible to imagine a
more lively and agreeable countenance. He was good at cricket and
boating, very good-natured, singularly free from conceit, not clever but
very sensible, and, lastly, his father and mother had been drowned by the
overturning of a boat when he was only two years old and had left him as
their only child and heir to one of the finest estates in the South of
England.
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