to observe this, and finally made something of a merit and joke of it.

"There is no managing of the little shrew," he would say. "Neither man
nor devil can bend or break her. If I smashed every bone in her carcass,
she would die shrieking hell at me and defiance."

If one admits the truth, it must be owned that if she had not had
bestowed upon her by nature gifts of beauty and vivacity so
extraordinary, and had been cursed with a thousandth part of the
vixenishness she displayed every day of her life, he would have broken
every bone in her carcass without a scruple or a qualm. But her beauty
seemed but to grow with every hour that passed, and it was by exceeding
good fortune exactly the fashion of beauty which he admired the most.
When she attained her tenth year she was as tall as a fine boy of twelve,
and of such a shape and carriage as young Diana herself might have
envied. Her limbs were long, and most divinely moulded, and of a
strength that caused admiration and amazement in all beholders. Her
father taught her to follow him in the hunting-field, and when she
appeared upon her horse, clad in her little breeches and top-boots and
scarlet coat, child though she was, she set the field on fire. She
learned full early how to coquet and roll her fine eyes; but it is also
true that she was not much of a languisher, as all her ogling was of a
destructive or proudly-attacking kind. It was her habit to leave others
to languish, and herself to lead them with disdainful vivacity to doing
so. She was the talk, and, it must be admitted, the scandal, of the
county by the day she was fifteen. The part wherein she lived was a
boisterous hunting shire where there were wide ditches and high hedges to
leap, and rough hills and moors to gallop over, and within the region
neither polite life nor polite education were much thought of; but even
in the worst portions of it there were occasional virtuous matrons who