The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring.

Aminta was glad of Mrs.Lawrence's absence.
She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming she knew not whence, of a dim likeness between her and these boys of the school when their hero dropped to nothing and sprang up again brilliantly--a kind of distant cousinship, in her susceptibility to be kindled by so small a flying spark as this one on its travels out of High Brent.

Moreover, the dear boys tied her to her girlhood, and netted her fleeting youth for the moth-box.

She pressed to hear more and more of them, and of the school-laundress Weyburn had called to see, and particularly of the child, little Jane, aged six.

Weyburn went to look at the sheet of water to which little Jane had given celebrity over the county.