later, he was taken from me, I felt as if he had commended you to my
care. When at the age of sixteen, with a boy's years and a man's
heart, you came to London, did I not try to be to you almost as a
mother? and did you not often tell me that you could confide to me the
secrets of your heart more readily than to any other?"

"You were to me," said Kenelm, with emotion, "that most precious and
sustaining good genius which a youth can find at the threshold of
life,--a woman gently wise, kindly sympathizing, shaming him by the
spectacle of her own purity from all grosser errors, elevating him
from mean tastes and objects by the exquisite, ineffable loftiness of
soul which is only found in the noblest order of womanhood. Come, I
will open my heart to you still. I fear it is more wayward than ever.
It still feels estranged from the companionship and pursuits natural
to my age and station. However, I have been seeking to brace and
harden my nature, for the practical ends of life, by travel and
adventure, chiefly among rougher varieties of mankind than we meet in
drawing-rooms. Now, in compliance with the duty I owe to my dear
father's wishes, I come back to these circles, which under your
auspices I entered in boyhood, and which even then seemed to me so
inane and artificial. Take a part in the world of these circles; such
is your wish. My answer is brief. I have been doing my best to
acquire a motive power, and have not succeeded. I see nothing that I
care to strive for, nothing that I care to gain. The very times in
which we live are to me, as to Hamlet, out of joint; and I am not born
like Hamlet to set them right. Ah! if I could look on society through
the spectacles with which the poor hidalgo in 'Gil Blas' looked on his
meagre board,--spectacles by which cherries appear the size of
peaches, and tomtits as large as turkeys! The imagination which is
necessary to ambition is a great magnifier."