First Impressions

'There's iron, they say, in all our blood,
And a grain or two perhaps is good;
But his, he makes me harshly feel,
Has got a little too much of steel.'
ANON.

'Margaret!' said Mr. Hale, as he returned from showing his guest
downstairs; 'I could not help watching your face with some
anxiety, when Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a
shop-boy. I knew it all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of
what was coming; but I half expected to see you get up and leave
the room.'

'Oh, papa! you don't mean that you thought me so silly? I really
liked that account of himself better than anything else he said.
Everything else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke
about himself so simply--with so little of the pretence that
makes the vulgarity of shop-people, and with such tender respect
for his mother, that I was less likely to leave the room then
than when he was boasting about Milton, as if there was not such
another place in the world; or quietly professing to despise
people for careless, wasteful improvidence, without ever seeming
to think it his duty to try to make them different,--to give them
anything of the training which his mother gave him, and to which
he evidently owes his position, whatever that may be. No! his
statement of having been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best of
all.'