charmed and surprised into the character of a declared suitor, it was
consonant with his scrupulous and loyal nature to view only the bright
side of Florence's gifts and qualities, and to seek to enamour his
grateful fancy with her beauty, her genius, and her tenderness for
himself. He had thus forced and formed his thoughts and hopes to centre
all in one object; and Florence and the Future had grown words which
conveyed the same meaning to his mind. Perhaps he felt more bitterly
her sudden and stunning accusations, couched as they were in language so
unqualified, because they fell upon his pride rather than his affection,
and were not softened away by the thousand excuses and remembrances
which a passionate love would have invented and recalled. It was a
deep, concentrated sense of injury and insult, that hardened and soured
his whole nature--wounded vanity, wounded pride, and wounded honour.

And the blow, too, came upon him at a time when he was most dissatisfied
with all other prospects. He was disgusted with the littleness of the
agents and springs of political life--he had formed a weary contempt for
the barrenness of literary reputation. At thirty years of age he had
necessarily outlived the sanguine elasticity of early youth, and he had
already broken up many of those later toys in business and ambition
which afford the rattle and the hobby-borse to our maturer manhood.
Always asking for something too refined and too exalted for human life,
every new proof of unworthiness in men and things saddened or revolted a
mind still too fastidious for that quiet contentment with the world as
it is, which we must all learn before we can make our philosophy
practical and our genius as fertile of the harvest as it may be prodigal
of the blossom. Haughty, solitary, and unsocial, the ordinary resources
of mortified and disappointed men were not for Ernest Maltravers.
Rigidly secluded in his country retirement, he consumed the days in
moody wanderings; and in the evenings he turned to books with a spirit