village, whose one object
of the worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for
a nod. But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to
taste to try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled to
deliver verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that. And
as it happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste
will frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the
young coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to
escape drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple
blocks or limp festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a
knowledge of her sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.
The more imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future
days, the more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.

Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites. She
was not under a French mother's rigid supervision. In France the mother
resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that
unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory. Vigilant
foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately
comprehended. Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and the
young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what
they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that
the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world's elect,
getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little
dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin,
but they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had
the world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is common during
youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of
wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from
the calculations on behalf of her girl.

Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar
trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the
Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at
all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating
threads. A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang
from h