knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.

Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
before the public. Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
her father's child.

At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
simplicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her
high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly
nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful serenader,
that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and
knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a sciential
rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve's own old