once took me away and placed me in the most fashionable school in
New York City. From there I was launched, without any word of motherly
counsel, into the gay society you know so well. Almost with my coming
out I found the world at my feet, and though my aunt showed me no love,
she evinced a certain pride in my success, and cast about to procure for
me a great match. Mr. Sinclair was the victim. He visited me, took me to
theatres, and eventually proposed. My aunt was in ecstasies. I, who felt
helpless before her will, was glad that the husband she had chosen for
me was at least a gentleman, and, to all appearances, respectable in his
living and nice in his tastes. But he was not the man I had dwelt on in
my dreams; and while I accepted him (it was not possible to do anything
else, with my aunt controlling every action, if not every thought), I
cared so little for Mr. Sinclair himself that I forgot to ask if his
many attentions were the result of any real feeling on his part, or only
such as he considered due to the woman he expected to make his wife.
You see what girls are. How I despise myself now for this miserable
frivolity!

"All this time I knew that I was not my aunt's only niece; that Dorothy
Camerden, whom I had never met, was as closely related to her as myself.
True to her heartless code, my aunt had placed us in separate schools,
and not till she found that I was to leave her, and that soon there
would be nobody to see that her dresses were bought with discretion, and
her person attended to with something like care, did she send for
Dorothy. I shall never forget my first impression of her. I had been
told that I need not expect much in the way of beauty and style, but
from my first glimpse of her dear face I saw that my soul's friend had
come, and that, marriage or no marriage, I need never be solitary again.

"I do not think I made as favourable an impression on my cousin as she
did on me. Dorothy was new to elaborate dressing and to all the follies
of fashionable life, and her look had more of awe than expectation in
it. But I gave her a hearty kiss, and in a week she was as brilliantly
equipped as myself.

"I loved her, but, from blindness of eye or an overwhelming egotism
which God has certainly punished, I did not consider her beautiful. This
I must acknowledge to you, if only to complete my humiliation. I never
imagined for a moment, even after I became the daily witness of your
many attentions to her