her, that I had a fancy--fancy it must have been, and yet still I felt
it to be real--that under every change she looked best; if she put on a
shawl, then a shawl became the most feminine of ornaments; if she laid
aside her shawl and her bonnet, then how nymph-like she seemed in her
undisguised and unadorned beauty! Full-dress seemed for the time to be
best, as bringing forward into relief the splendor of her person, and
allowing the exposure of her arms; a simple morning-dress, again,
seemed better still, as fitted to call out the childlike innocence of
her face, by confining the attention to that. But all these are
feelings of fond and blind affection, hanging with rapture over the
object of something too like idolatry. God knows, if that be a sin, I
was but too profound a sinner; yet sin it never was, sin it could not
be, to adore a beauty such as thine, my Agnes. Neither was it her
beauty by itself, and that only, which I sought at such times to
admire; there was a peculiar sort of double relation in which she stood
at moments of pleasurable expectation and excitement, since our little
Francis had become of an age to join our party, which made some aspects
of her character trebly interesting. She was a wife--and wife to one
whom she looked up to as her superior in understanding and in knowledge
of the world, whom, therefore, she leaned to for protection. On the
other hand, she was also a mother. Whilst, therefore, to her child she
supported the matronly part of guide, and the air of an experienced
person; to me she wore, ingenuously and without disguise, the part of a
child herself, with all the giddy hopes and unchastised imaginings of
that buoyant age. This double character, one aspect of which looks
towards her husband and one to her children, sits most gracefully upon
many a young wife whose heart is pure and innocent; and the collision
between the two separate parts imposed by duty on the one hand, by
extreme youth on the other, the one telling her that she is a
responsible head of a family and the depository of her husband's honor