nor would
even he have attempted it had he not been assured of the support of his
phalanx of great ladies. They indeed, after being taken into the
secret, had stipulated that first they must have an inspection of the
transformed dairymaid; and the review was not unfavourable. Duchess
Susan came out of it more scatheless than her duke. She was tongue-tied,
and her tutored walking and really admirable stature helped her to
appease, the critics of her sex; by whom her too readily blushful
innocence was praised, with a reserve, expressed in the remark, that she
was a monstrous fine toy for a duke's second childhood, and should never
have been let fly from his nursery. Her milliner was approved. The duke
was a notorious connoisseur of female charms, and would see, of course,
to the decorous adornment of her person by the best of modistes. Her
smiling was pretty, her eyes were soft; she might turn out good, if well
guarded for a time; but these merits of the woman are not those of the
great lady, and her title was too strong a beam on her character to give
it a fair chance with her critics. They one and all recommended
powder for her hair and cheeks. That odour of the shepherdess could be
exorcised by no other means, they declared. Her blushing was indecent.

Truly the critics of the foeman sex behaved in a way to cause the
blushes to swarm rosy as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her
sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they flutter like her
loosened zone, and breast the air thick as flower petals on the summer's
breath, weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might protest
her inability to keep her blushes down; that the wrong was done by the
insolent eyes, and not by her artless cheeks. Ay, but nature, if we
are to tame these men, must be swathed and concealed, partly stifled,
absolutely stifled upon occasion. The natural woman does not move a
foot without striking earth to conjure up the horrid apparition of the
natural man, who is not as she, but a cannibal savage. To be the light
which leads, it is her business to don the misty vesture of an idea,
that she may dwell as an idea in men's minds, very dim, very powerful,
but abstruse, unseizable. Much wisdom was imparted to her on the
subject, and she understood a little, and echoed hollow to the
remainder, willing to show entire docility as far as her intelligence
consented to be awake. She was in that stage of the dainty, faintly
tinged innocen