to my study dressed for going abroad; for such was my admiration of
her, that I had a fancy--fancy it must have been, and yet still I felt
it to be real--that under every change she looked best; if she put on a
shawl, then a shawl became the most feminine of ornaments; if she laid
aside her shawl and her bonnet, then how nymph-like she seemed in her
undisguised and unadorned beauty! Full-dress seemed for the time to be
best, as bringing forward into relief the splendour of her person, and
allowing the exposure of her arms; a simple morning-dress, again, seemed
better still, as fitted to call out the childlike innocence of her face,
by confining the attention to that. But all these are feelings of fond
and blind affection, hanging with rapture over the object of something
too like idolatry. God knows, if that be a sin, I was but too profound a
sinner; yet sin it never was, sin it could not be, to adore a beauty
such as thine, my Agnes. Neither was it her beauty by itself, and that
only, which I sought at such times to admire; there was a peculiar sort
of double relation in which she stood at moments of pleasurable
expectation and excitement, since our little Francis had become of an
age to join our party, which made some aspects of her character trebly
interesting. She was a wife--and wife to one whom she looked up to as
her superior in understanding and in knowledge of the world, whom,
therefore, she leaned to for protection. On the other hand, she was also
a mother. Whilst, therefore, to her child she supported the matronly
part of guide, and the air of an experienced person; to me she wore,
ingenuously and without disguise, the part of a child herself, with all
the giddy hopes and unchastised imaginings of that buoyant age. This
double character, one aspect of which looks towards her husband and one
to her children, sits most gracefully upon many a young wife whose heart
is pure and innocent; and the collision between the two separate parts
imposed by duty on the one hand, by extreme youth on the other, the one
telling her that she is a responsible head of a family and the
depository of her husband's honour in its tenderest and most vital
interests, the other telling her, through the liveliest language of
animal sensibility, and through the very pulses of her blood, that she
is herself a child; this collision gives an inexpressible charm to the
whole demeanour of many a young married woman, making her other
fascinations