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