brilliant woman is often an object of the devoted admiration--it
might almost be termed worship, or idolatry--of some young girl, who
perhaps beholds the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as
little hope of personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of
heaven. We men are too gross to comprehend it. Even a woman, of
mature age, despises or laughs at such a passion. There occurred to
me no mode of accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by
supposing that she had read some of Zenobia's stories (as such
literature goes everywhere), or her tracts in defence of the sex, and
had come hither with the one purpose of being her slave. There is
nothing parallel to this, I believe,--nothing so foolishly
disinterested, and hardly anything so beautiful,--in the masculine
nature, at whatever epoch of life; or, if there be, a fine and rare
development of character might reasonably be looked for from the
youth who should prove himself capable of such self-forgetful
affection.

Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an
undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.

"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she
in the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It
is a

grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the
startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight
Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the
stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold
water and give me my death with a pair of wet slippers! And when the
verses are written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you