rsonage represented to her an
aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to the degree of
an inconvenience. She had never yet known a personage; there had been no
personages, in this sense, in her life; there were probably none such at
all in her native land. When she had thought of individual eminence she
had thought of it on the basis of character and wit--of what one
might like in a gentleman's mind and in his talk. She herself was a
character--she couldn't help being aware of that; and hitherto her
visions of a completed consciousness had concerned themselves largely
with moral images--things as to which the question would be whether they
pleased her sublime soul. Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely
and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to
be measured by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of
appreciation--an appreciation that the girl, with her habit of judging
quickly and freely, felt she lacked patience to bestow. He appeared to
demand of her something that no one else, as it were, had presumed to
do. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate
had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he
rather invidiously lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious,
but persuasive, told her to resist--murmured to her that virtually
she had a system and an orbit of her own. It told her other things
besides--things which both contradicted and confirmed each other; that
a girl might do much worse than trust herself to such a man and that it
would be very interesting to see something of his system from his own
point of view; that on the other hand, however, there was evidently a
great deal of it which she should regard only as a complication of every
hour, and that even in the whole there was something stiff and stupid
which would make it a burden. Furthermore there was a young man lately
come from America who had no system at all, but who had a character
of which it was useless for her to try to persuade herself that the
impression on her mind had been light. The letter she carried in
her pocket all sufficiently reminded her of the contrary. Smile not,
however, I venture to repeat, at this simple young woman from Albany who
debated whether she should accept an English peer before he had offered
himself and who was disposed to believe that on the whole she could do
better. She was a person of great good faith, an