d, a bright, light
handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides the confusion, the unreality
due to precipitation of events and change of scene, the sense that she
had (how long ago--days, weeks, or years? in such a state time becomes a
great muddle and mystery) been actually married by proxy, that she had
come the whole way from Paris, through Venice and across the sea,
besides being in this dream-like, phantasmagoric condition, which must
have made all things seem light--it is probable that the young lady had
scarcely sufficient consciousness of herself as a grown-up, independent,
independently feeling and thinking creature, to feel or think very
strongly over her situation. It was the regular thing for girls of
Louise of Stolberg's rank to be put through a certain amount of rather
vague convent education, as she had been at Mons; to be put through a
certain amount of balls and parties; to be put through the formality of
betrothal and marriage; all this was the half-conscious dream--then
would come the great waking up. And Louise of Stolberg was, most likely,
in a state of feeling like that which comes to us with the earliest
light through the blinds: pleasant, or unpleasant? We know not which;
still drowsing, dreaming, but yet strongly conscious that in a moment we
shall be awake to reality.

There was, nevertheless, in the position of this girl something which,
even in these circumstances, must have compelled her to think, or, at
all events, to meditate, however confusedly, upon the present and the
future. If she had in her the smallest spark of imagination she must
have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of continuous surprise, recurring
like the tick of a clock, which haunts us sometimes with the fact that
it really does just happen to be ourselves to whom some curious lot,
some rare combination of the numbers in life's lottery, has come. For
the man whom she was going to marry--nay, to whom, in a sense, she was
married already--the unknown whom she would see for the first time that
evening, was not the mere typical bridegroom, the mere man of rank and
fortune, to whom, whatever his particular individual shape and name, the
daughter of a high-born but impoverished house had known herself, since
her childhood, to be devoted.

Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emanuele, daughter of the late Prince
Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern, Prince of the Empire, who had
died, a Colonel of Maria Theresa, in the battle of Leuthe