he
distant blessings of the mighty world, lying somewhere in the world's
forests, across wild seas, veiled, encompassed with beautiful perils, a
throbbing secrecy, but too remote to quicken her bosom's throbs. Her
chief idea of it was, the enrichment of the world by love.

Thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of selection.

And then did the best man of a host blow his triumphant horn, and
loudly.

He looked the fittest; he justified the dictum of Science. The survival
of the Patternes was assured. "I would," he said to his admirer, Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson, "have bargained for health above everything, but
she has everything besides--lineage, beauty, breeding: is what they
call an heiress, and is the most accomplished of her sex." With a
delicate art he conveyed to the lady's understanding that Miss
Middleton had been snatched from a crowd, without a breath of the crowd
having offended his niceness. He did it through sarcasm at your modern
young women, who run about the world nibbling and nibbled at, until
they know one sex as well as the other, and are not a whit less
cognizant of the market than men; pure, possibly; it is not so easy to
say innocent; decidedly not our feminine ideal. Miss Middleton was
different: she was the true ideal, fresh-gathered morning fruit in a
basket, warranted by her bloom.

Women do not defend their younger sisters for doing what they perhaps
have done--lifting a veil to be seen, and peeping at a world where
innocence is as poor a guarantee as a babe's caul against shipwreck.
Women of the world never think of attacking the sensual stipulation for
perfect bloom, silver purity, which is redolent of the Oriental origin
of the love-passion of their lords. Mrs. Mountstuart congratulated Sir
Willoughby on the prize he had won in the fair western-eastern.

"Let me see her," she said; and Miss Middleton was introduced and
critically observed.

She had the mouth that smiles in repose. The lips met full on the
centre of the bow and thinned along to a lifting dimple; the eyelids
also lifted slightly at the outer corners, and seemed, like the lip
into the limpid cheek, quickening up the temples, as with a run of
light, or the ascension indicated off a shoot of colour. Her features
were playfellows of one another, none of them pretending to rigid
correctness, nor the nose to the ordinary dignity of governess among
merry girls, despite which the nose was of a fair design, not acute