congruity about her, however, which is almost absurd. She has been
brought up in such seclusion--and under the sole tuition of a man not
only a pedant, but who has never stepped through the gates of the last
generation--that she reminds one of those fair English dames who used
to prowl about their parks with the Phaedo under their arm and long
for a block on which to float down to prosperity; Plato had quite
enough to do to sail for himself. And upon this epitomized abstraction
of the sixteenth century, this mingling of old-time stateliness, of
womanly charm, of tougher mental fibre, are superimposed the shallow
and purely objective attributes of the nineteenth-century belle and
woman of fashion. It is almost a shock to hear her use our modern
vernacular, and when she relapses into the somewhat stilted language
in which she is still accustomed to think, it is a positive relief.
She is conscious that she is apt to be a little high-flown, and when
she forgets herself and is natural, she quickly pulls herself in with
a round turn, which is an apology in itself. Upon such occasions a
man wants to get his fingers about the throat of the world. She has
acquired all the little arts and mannerisms of the London drawing-room
girl, and although they do not sit ungracefully upon her, because
she is innately graceful, and too clever to assume a virtue which
she cannot assimilate, still it is like a foreigner who speaks your
language to perfection in all but accent, and whom you long to hear in
his own tongue. Put her back in her Welsh castle, and the scales
would fall from her as from a mermaid who loves. If she returns to
her father at the end of the season, I think I will call upon her six
months later. She should go now, though; scales are apt to corrode.
But what is the mystery about the mother? Did she elope with the
coachman? But, no; that is strictly a modern freak of fashion. Perhaps
she died in a mad-house. Not improbable, if she had anything of the
nature of this girl in her, and Sir Iltyd sowed the way with thorns
too sharp. Poor girl! she is too young for mysteries, whatever it is.
I shall like to know her better, but she is so intense that she makes
me feel frivolous. I am never intense except when I have the blues,
and intensity, with my peculiar mental anatomy, is a thing to be
avoided. In what is invariably the last chapter of those attacks of
morbid dissatisfaction I shall some day feel an intense desire to blow
out