d madly and
presumptuously; as boys will do; but I had loved worthily,--the love
left no blush on my manhood; and Fanny's very happiness was my perfect
and total cure of every wound in my heart not quite scarred over before.
Had she been discontented, sorrowful, without joy in the ties she had
formed, there might have been more danger that I should brood over the
past and regret the loss of its idol. Here there was none. And the very
improvement in her beauty had so altered its character--so altered--that
Fanny Trevanion and Lady Castleton seemed two persons. And thus
observing and listening to her, I could now dispassionately perceive
such differences in our natures as seemed to justify Trevanion's
assertion, which once struck me as so monstrous, "that we should not
have been happy had fate permitted our union." Pure-hearted and simple
though she remained in the artificial world, still that world was her
element; its interests occupied her; its talk, though just chastened
from scandal, flowed from her lips. To borrow the words of a man who
was himself a courtier, and one so distinguished that he could afford
to sneer at Chesterfield, (2) "She had the routine of that style of
conversation which is a sort of gold leaf, that is a great embellishment
where it is joined to anything else." I will not add, "but makes a
very poor figure by itself,"--for that Lady Castleton's conversation
certainly did not do,--perhaps, indeed, because it was not "by
itself,"--and the gold leaf was all the better for being thin, since it
could not cover even the surface of the sweet and amiable nature over
which it was spread. Still, this was not the mind in which now, in
maturer experience, I would seek to find sympathy with manly action, or
companionship in the charms of intellectual leisure.

There was about this same beautiful favorite of nature and fortune a
certain helplessness, which had even its grace in that high station, and
which, perhaps, tended to insure her doinestic peace, for it served
to attach her to those who had won influence over her, and was happily
accompanied by a most affectionate disposition. But still, if less
favored by circumstances, less sheltered from every wind that could
visit her too roughly; if, as the wife of a man of inferior rank, she
had failed of that high seat and silken canopy reserved for the spoiled
darlings of fortune,--that helplessness might have become querulous.
I thought of poor Ellen Bolding an