"Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since; for we
students and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth, to
look to the depth, of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to the
surface it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing stream only
four feet deep, and certainly more force and more health, than in a
sullen pool thirty yards to the bottom. I did not do Trevanion justice;
I did not see how naturally he realized Lady Ellinor's ideal. I have
said that she was like many women in one. Trevanion was a thousand men
in one. He had learning to please her mind, eloquence to dazzle her
fancy, beauty to please her eye, reputation precisely of the kind to
allure her vanity, honor and conscientious purpose to satisfy her
judgment; and, above all, he was ambitious,--ambitious not as I, not as
Roland was, but ambitious as Ellinor was; ambitious, not to realize some
grand ideal in the silent heart, but to grasp the practical, positive
substances that lay without.

"Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he.

"I saw not all this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no
particular court to Ellinor.

"But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to
thin. Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with
me; and one day, walking in his garden, he gave me the opportunity,--for
I need not say, Pisistratus," said my father, looking at me earnestly,
"that before any man of honor, if of inferior worldly pretensions, will
open his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his duty to speak first
to the parent, whose confidence has imposed that trust." I bowed my
head and colored.