n Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.

Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised
of being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense
of the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of
Ormont, she could have replied, "We might have given them a higher idea
of us"--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field
beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much
subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched.
The young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her
vocabulary. Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the
two gentlemen loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen
young hero's part. His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of
boxing men; her lord informed her of his having made, or of his making,
matches to run or swim or walk certain distances against competitors or
within a given time. He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom
he raced out of town on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to
form.

But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where
was a blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose
golden helm was fired by Pallas?

Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
on his meanness of nature.

Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such
a feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman's pride but the
staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot
be forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself
sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a
girl's worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
discovered meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked memory was caused by
his having plunged h