that /instanter/, and so, seemingly, with the most hasty and the most
insolent decorum, incense, wound, and in his interpretation of the act,
contemn one whom I loved as I loved my uncle; or, to delay the marriage,
to separate Isora, and to leave my future wife to the malignant
consequences that would necessarily be drawn from a sojourn of weeks in
my house. This fact there was no chance of concealing; servants have
more tongues than Argus had eyes, and my youthful extravagance had
filled my whole house with those pests of society. The latter measure
was impossible, the former was most painful. Was there no third
way?--there was that of a private marriage. This obviated not every
evil; but it removed many: it satisfied my impatient love; it placed
Isora under a sure protection; it secured and established her honour the
moment the ceremony should be declared; and it avoided the seeming
ingratitude and indelicacy of disobeying my uncle, without an effort of
patience to appease him. I should have time and occasion then, I
thought, for soothing and persuading him, and ultimately winning that
consent which I firmly trusted I should sooner or later extract from his
kindness of heart.


* A Roman consul, who, removing the most celebrated remains of Grecian
antiquity to Rome, assured the persons charged with conveying them that,
if they injured any, they should make others to replace them.


That some objections existed to this mediatory plan was true enough:
those objections related to Isora rather than to myself, and she was the
first, on my hinting at the proposal, to overcome its difficulties. The
leading feature in Isora's character was generosity; and, in truth, I
know not a quality more dangerous either to man or woman. Herself was