speech that need
excite either the amazement or the terror I see in your face at this
moment."

"I _am_ amazed; and if I understand you aright, I have grounds to be
shocked besides."

"Upon my word," said she, in a voice that trembled with passion, "I
have reason to congratulate myself on the score of brotherly affection.
Almost the last words Jack spoke to me at parting were, 'For God's
sake, shake off that old scamp;' and now you--that hold a very different
position amongst us--you, who will one day be the head of the family,
deliberately tell me you are shocked at the prospect of my being allied
to one of the first names in the peerage."

"My dear Marion," said he, tenderly, "it is not the name, it is not the
rank I object to."

"It is his fortune, then? I'm sure it can't be his abilities."

"It is neither. It is simply that the man might be your grandfather."

"Well, sir," said she, drawing herself up, and assuming a manner of
intense hauteur, "and if _I_,--I conclude I am the person most to
be consulted,--if I do not regard this disparity of years as an
insurmountable obstacle, by what right can one of my family presume to
call it such?"

"My dear sister," said he, "can you not imagine the right of a brother
to consult for your happiness?"

"Happiness is a very large word. If it were for Nelly that you were
interesting yourself, I 've no doubt your advice and counsel ought to
have great weight; but I am not one of your love-in-a-cottage young
ladies, Gusty. I am, I must own it, excessively worldly. Whatever
happiness I could propose to myself in life is essentially united to a
certain ambition. We have as many of the advantages of mere wealth as
most people: as fine equipage, as many footmen, as good a cook, and
as costly silver; and what do they do for us? They permit us simply to
enter the lists with a set of people who have high-stepping horses and
powdered lackeys like ourselves, but who are no more the world, no more
society, than one of papa's Indiamen is a ship of the Royal Navy. Why do
I say this to you, who were at Oxford, who saw it all--ay, and felt it
all--in those fresh years of youth when these are sharp sufferings? You
know well--you told me your griefs at the time--that you were in a set
without being 'of it;' that the stamp of inequality was as indelibly
fixed upon you as though you were a corporal and wore coarse cloth.
Now, these things are hard to bear for a man; for a woman they are