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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Godolphin, by E. B. Lytton, Vol. 2
+#178 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+Title: Godolphin, Volume 2.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7751]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 27, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GODOLPHIN, BY LYTTON, V2 ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Andrew Heath
+and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+GODOLPHIN, Volume 2.
+By Edward Bulwer Lytton
+(Lord Lytton)
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE FEELINGS OF CONSTANCE AND GODOLPHIN TOWARDS EACH OTHER.--THE
+DISTINCTION IN THEIR CHARACTERS.--REMARKS ON THE EFFECTS PRODUCED BY THE
+WORLD UPON GODOLPHIN.--THE HIDE.--RURAL DESCRIPTIONS.--OMENS.--THE FIRST
+INDISTINCT CONFESSION.
+
+Every day, at the hour in which Constance was visible, Godolphin had
+loaded the keeper, and had returned to attend upon her movements.  They
+walked and rode together; and in the evening, Godolphin hung over her
+chair, and listened to her songs; for though, as I have before said, she
+had but little science in instrumental music, her voice was rich and soft
+beyond the pathos of ordinary singers.
+
+Lady Erpingham saw, with secret delight, what she believed to be a growing
+attachment.  She loved Constance for herself, and Godolphin for his
+father's memory.  She thought again and again what a charming couple they
+would make--so handsome--so gifted: and if Prudence whispered also--so
+poor, the kind Countess remembered, that she herself had saved from her
+ample jointure a sum which she had always designed as a dowry for
+Constance, and which, should Godolphin be the bridegroom, she felt she
+should have a tenfold pleasure in bestowing.  With this fortune, which
+would place them, at least, in independence, she united in her kindly
+imagination the importance which she imagined Godolphin's talents must
+ultimately acquire; and for which, in her aristocratic estimation, she
+conceived the senate the only legitimate sphere.  She said, she hinted,
+nothing to Constance; but she suffered nature, youth, and companionship to
+exercise their sway.
+
+And the complexion of Godolphin's feelings for Constance Vernon did indeed
+resemble love--was love itself, though rather love in its romance than its
+reality.  What were those of Constance for him?  She knew not herself at
+that time.  Had she been of a character one shade less ambitious, or less
+powerful, they would have been love, and love of no common character.  But
+within her musing, and self-possessed, and singularly constituted mind,
+there was, as yet, a limit to every sentiment, a chain to the wings of
+every thought, save those of one order; and that order was not of love.
+There was a marked difference, in all respects, between the characters of
+the two; and it was singular enough, that that of the woman was the less
+romantic, and composed of the simpler materials.
+
+A volume of Wordsworth's most exquisite poetry had then just appeared.
+"Is not this wonderful?" said Godolphin, reciting some of those lofty,
+but refining thoughts which characterise the Pastor of modern poets.
+
+Constance shook her head.
+
+"What! you do not admire it?"
+
+"I do not understand it."
+
+"What poetry do you admire?"
+
+"This."
+
+It was Pope's translation of the Iliad.
+
+"Yes, yes, to be sure," said Godolphin, a little vexed; "we all admire
+this in its way: but what else?"
+
+Constance pointed to a passage in the Palamon and Arcite of Dryden.
+
+Godolphin threw down his Wordsworth.  "You take an ungenerous advantage of
+me," said he.  "Tell me something you admire, which, at least, I may have
+the privilege of disputing,--something that you think generally
+neglected."
+
+"I admire few things that are generally neglected," answered Constance,
+with her bright and proud smile.  "Fame gives its stamp to all metal that
+is of intrinsic value."
+
+This answer was quite characteristic of Constance: she worshipped fame far
+more than the genius which won it.  "Well, then," said Godolphin, "let us
+see now if we can come to a compromise of sentiment;" and be took up the
+Comus of Milton.
+
+No one read poetry so beautifully: his voice was so deep and flexible; and
+his countenance answered so well to every modulation of his voice.
+Constance was touched by the reader, but not by the verse.  Godolphin had
+great penetration; he perceived it, and turned to the speeches of Satan in
+Paradise Lost.  The noble countenance before him grew luminous at once:
+the lip quivered, the eye sparkled; the enthusiasm of Godolphin was not
+comparable to that of Constance.  The fact was, that the broad and common
+emotions of the intellectual character struck upon the right key.
+Courage, defiance, ambition, these she comprehended to their fullest
+extent; but the rich subtleties of thought which mark the cold and bright
+page of the Comus; the noble Platonism--the high and rare love for what is
+abstractedly good, these were not "sonorous and trumpet-speaking" enough
+for the heart of one meant by Nature for a heroine or a queen, not a
+poetess or a philosopher.
+
+But all that in literature was delicate, and half-seen, and abstruse, had
+its peculiar charm for Godolphin.  Of a reflective and refining mind, he
+had early learned to despise the common emotions of men: glory touched him
+not, and to ambition he had shut his heart.  Love, with him--even though
+he had been deemed, not unjustly, a man of gallantry and pleasure--love
+was not compounded of the ordinary elements of the passions.  Full of
+dreams, and refinements, and intense abstractions, it was a love that
+seemed not homely enough for endurance, and of too rare a nature to hope
+for sympathy in return.
+
+And so it was in his intercourse with Constance, both were continually
+disappointed.  "You do not feel this," said Constance.  "She cannot
+understand me," sighed Godolphin.
+
+But we must not suppose--despite his refinements, and his reveries, and
+his love for the intellectual and the pure--that Godolphin was of a
+stainless character or mind.  He was one who, naturally full of decided
+and marked qualities, was, by the peculiar elements of our society,
+rendered a doubtful, motley, and indistinct character, tinctured by the
+frailties that leave us in a wavering state between vice and virtue.  The
+energies that had marked his boyhood were dulled and crippled in the
+indolent life of the world.  His wandering habits for the last few
+years--the soft and poetical existence of the South--had fed his natural
+romance, and nourished that passion for contemplation which the
+intellectual man of pleasure so commonly forms; for pleasure has a
+philosophy of its own--a sad, a fanciful, yet deep persuasion of the
+vanity of all things--a craving after the bright ideal--
+
+   "The desire of the moth for the star."
+
+Solomon's thirst for pleasure was the companion of his wisdom: satiety was
+the offspring of the one--discontent of the other.  But this philosophy,
+though seductive, is of no wholesome nor usefnl character; it is the
+philosophy of feelings, not principles--of the heart, not head.  So with
+Godolphin: he was too refined in his moralising to cling to what was
+moral.  The simply good and the simply bad he left for us plain folks to
+discover.  He was unattracted by the doctrines of right and wrong which
+serve for all men; but he had some obscure and shadowy standard in his own
+mind by which he compared the actions of others.  He had imagination,
+genius, even heart; was brilliant always, sometimes profound; graceful in
+society, yet seldom social: a lonely man, yet a man of the world; generous
+to individuals, selfish to the mass.  How many fine qualities worse than
+thrown away!
+
+Who will not allow that he has met many such men?--and who will not follow
+this man to his end?
+
+One day (it was the last of Godolphin's protracted visit) as the sun was
+waning to its close, and the time was unusually soft and tranquil,
+Constance and Godolphin were returning slowly home from their customary
+ride.  They passed by a small inn, bearing the common sign of the
+"Chequers," round which a crowd of peasants were assembled, listening to
+the rude music which a wandering Italian boy drew from his guitar.  The
+scene was rustic and picturesque; and as Godolphin reined in his horse and
+gazed on the group, he little dreamed of the fierce and dark emotions with
+which, at a far distant period, he was destined to revisit that spot.
+
+"Our peasants," said he, as they rode on, "require some humanising
+relaxation like that we have witnessed.  The music and the morris-dance
+have gone from England; and instead of providing, as formerly, for the
+amusement of the grinded labourer, our legislators now regard with the
+most watchful jealousy his most distant approach to festivity.  They
+cannot bear the rustic to be merry: disorder and amusement are words for
+the same offence."
+
+"I doubt," said the earnest Constance, "whether the legislators are not
+right.  For men given to amusement are easily enslaved.  All noble
+thoughts are grave."
+
+Thus talking, they passed a shallow ford in the stream.  "We are not far
+from the Priory," said Godolphin, pointing to its ruins, that rose greyly
+in the evening skies from the green woods around it.
+
+Constance sighed involuntarily.  She felt pain in being reminded of the
+slender fortunes of her companion.  Ascending the gentle hill that swelled
+from the stream, she now, to turn the current of her thoughts, pointed
+admiringly to the blue course of the waters, as they wound through their
+shagged banks.  And deep, dark, rushing, even at that still hour, went the
+stream through the boughs that swept over its surface.  Here and there the
+banks suddenly shelved down, mingling with the waves; then abruptly they
+rose, overspread with thick and tangled umbrage, several feet above the
+level of the river.
+
+"How strange it is," said Godolphin, that at times a feeling comes over
+us, as we gaze upon certain places, which associates the scene either with
+some dim-remembered and dream-like images of the Past, or with a prophetic
+and fearful omen of the Future!  As I gaze now upon this spot--those
+banks--that whirling river--it seems as if my destiny claimed a mysterious
+sympathy with the scene: when--how-wherefore--I know not--guess not: only
+this shadowy and chilling sentiment unaccountably creeps over me.  Every
+one has known a similar strange, indistinct, feeling at certain times and
+places, and with a similar inability to trace the cause.  And yet, is it
+not singular that in poetry, which wears most feelings to an echo, I leave
+never met with any attempt to describe it?"
+
+"Because poetry," said Constance, "is, after all, but a hackneyed
+imitation of the most common thoughts, giving them merely a gloss by the
+brilliancy of verse.  And yet how little poets _know!_  They _imagine,_
+and they _imitate;_--behold all their secrets!"
+
+"Perhaps you are right," said Godolphin, musingly; "and I, who have often
+vainly fancied I had the poetical temperament, have been so chilled and
+sickened by the characteristics of the tribe, that I have checked its
+impulses with a sort of disdain; and thus the Ideal, having no vent in me,
+preys within, creating a thousand undefined dreams and unwilling
+superstitions, making me enamoured of the Shadowy and Unknown, and
+dissatisfying me with the petty ambitions of the world."
+
+"You will awake hereafter," said Constance, earnestly.
+
+Godolphin shook his head, and replied not.
+
+Their way now lay along a green lane that gradually wound round a hill
+commanding a view of great richness and beauty.  Cottages, and spires, and
+groves, gave life--but it was scattered and remote life--to the scene; and
+the broad stream, whose waves, softened in the distance, did not seem to
+break the even surface of the tide, flowed onward, glowing in the
+sunlight, till it was lost among dark and luxuriant woods.
+
+Both once more arrested their horses by a common impulse, and both became
+suddenly silent as they gazed.  Godolphin was the first to speak: it
+brought to his memory a scene in that delicious land, whose Southern
+loveliness Claude has transfused to the canvas, and De Stael to the page.
+With his own impassioned and earnest language, he spoke to Constance of
+that scene and that country.  Every tree before him furnished matter for
+his illustration or his contrast; and, as she heard that magic voice, and
+speaking, too, of a country dedicated to love, Constance listened with
+glistening eyes, and a cheek which he,--consummate master of the secrets
+of womanhood--perceived was eloquent with thoughts which she knew not, but
+which _he_ interpreted to the letter.
+
+"And in such a spot," said he, continuing, and fixing his deep and
+animated gaze on her,--"in such a spot I could have stayed for ever but
+for one recollection, one feeling--_I should have been too much alone!_
+In a wild or a grand, or even a barren country, we may live in solitude,
+and find fit food for thought; but not in one so soft, so subduing, as
+that which I saw and see.  Love comes over us then in spite of ourselves;
+and I feel--I feel now--"his voice trembled as he spoke--"that any secret
+we may before have nursed, though hitherto unacknowledged, makes itself at
+length a voice.  We are oppressed with the desire to be loved; we long for
+the courage to say we love."
+
+Never before had Godolphin, though constantly verging into sentiment,
+spoken to Constance in so plain a language.  Eye, voice, cheek--all spoke.
+She felt that he had confessed he loved her!  And was she not happy at
+that thought?  She was: it was her happiest moment.  But, in that sort of
+vague and indistinct shrinking from the subject with which a woman who
+loves hears a disclosure of love from him on whose lips it is most sweet,
+she muttered some confused attempt to change the subject, and quickened
+her horse's pace.  Godolphin did not renew the topic so interesting and so
+dangerous, only, as with the winding of the road the landscape gradually
+faded from their view, he said, in a low voice, as if to himself,--"How
+long, how fondly, shall I remember this day!"
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+GODOLPHIN'S RETURN HOME.--HIS SOLILOQUY.--LORD ERPINGHAM'S ARRIVAL AT
+WENDOVER CASTLE.--THE EARL DESCRIBED.--HIS ACCOUNT OF GODOLPHIN'S LIFE AT
+ROME.
+
+With a listless step, Godolphin re-entered the threshold of his
+cottage-home.  He passed into a small chamber, which was yet the largest
+in his house.  The poor and scanty furniture scattered around; the old,
+tuneless, broken harpsichord; the worn and tattered carpet; the tenantless
+birdcage in the recess by the window; the bookshelves, containing some
+dozens of worthless volumes; the sofa of the last century (when, if people
+knew comfort, they placed it not in lounging) small, narrow, highbacked,
+hard, and knotted; these, just as his father had left, just as his boyhood
+had seen, them, greeted him with a comfortless and chill, though familiar
+welcome.  It was evening: he ordered a fire and lights; and leaning his
+face on his hand as he contemplated the fitful and dusky outbreakings of
+the flame through the bars of the niggard and contracted grate, he sat
+himself down to hold commune with his heart.
+
+"So, I love this woman," said he, "do I?  Have I not deceived myself?  She
+is poor--no connection; she has nothing whereby to reinstate my house's
+fortunes, to rebuild this mansion, or repurchase yonder demesnes.  I love
+her!  _I_ who have known the value of her sex so well, that I have said,
+again and again, I would not shackle life with a princess!  Love may
+withstand possession--true--but not time.  In three years there would be
+no glory in the face of Constance, and I should be--what?  My fortunes,
+broken as they are, can support me alone, and with my few wants.  But if
+married! the haughty Constance my wife!  Nay, nay, nay! this must not be
+thought of!  I, the hero of Paris! the pupil of Saville!  I, to be so
+beguiled as even to _dream_ of such a madness!
+
+"Yet I have that within me that might make a stir in the world--I might
+rise.  Professions are open; the Diplomacy, the House of Commons.  What!
+Percy Godolphin be ass enough to grow ambitious! to toil, to fret, to
+slave, to answer fools on a first principle, and die at length of a broken
+heart for a lost place!  Pooh, pooh!  I, who despise your prime ministers,
+can scarcely stoop to their apprenticeship.  Life is too short for toil.
+And what do men strive for?--to enjoy: but why not enjoy without the toil?
+And relinquish Constance?  Ay, it is but one woman lost!"
+
+So ended the soliloquy of a man scarcely of age.  The world teaches us its
+last lessons betimes; but then, lest we should have nothing left to
+acquire from its wisdom, it employs the rest of our life in unlearning all
+that it first taught.
+
+Meanwhile, the time approached when Lord Erpingham was to arrive at
+Wendover Castle; and at length came the day itself.  Naturally anxious to
+enjoy as exclusively as possible the company of her son the first day of
+his return from so long an absence, Lady Erpingham had asked no one to
+meet him.  The earl's heavy travelling-carriage at length rolled
+clattering up the court-yard; and in a few minutes a tall man, in the
+prime of life, and borrowing some favourable effect as to person from the
+large cloak of velvet and furs which hung round him, entered the room, and
+Lady Erpingham embraced her son.  The kind and familiar manner with which
+he answered her inquiries and congratulations was somewhat changed when he
+suddenly perceived Constance.  Lord Erpingham was a cold man, and, like
+most cold men, ashamed of the evidence of affection.  He greeted Constance
+very quietly; and, as she thought, slightly: but his eyes turned to her
+far more often than any friend of Lord Erpingham's might ever have
+remarked those large round hazel eyes turn to any one before.
+
+When the earl withdrew to adjust his toilet for dinner, Lady Erpingham, as
+she wiped her eyes, could not help exclaiming to Constance, "Is he not
+handsome?  What a figure!"
+
+Constance was a little addicted to flattery where she liked the one who
+was to be flattered, and she assented readily enough to the maternal
+remark.  Hitherto, however, she had not observed anything more in Lord
+Erpingham than his height and his cloak: as he re-entered and led her to
+the dining-room she took a better, though still but a casual, survey.
+
+Lord Erpingham was that sort of person of whom _men_ always say, "What a
+prodigiously fine fellow!"  He was above six feet high, stout in
+proportion: not, indeed, accurately formed, nor graceful in bearing, but
+quite as much so as a man of six feet high need be.  He had a manly
+complexion of brown, yellow, and red.  His whiskers were exceedingly
+large, black, and well arranged.  His eyes, as I have before said, were
+round, large, and hazel; they were also unmeaning.  His teeth were good;
+and his nose, neither aquiline nor Grecian, was yet a very showy nose upon
+the whole.  All the maidservants admired him; and you felt, in looking at
+him, that it was a pity our army should lose so good a grenadier.
+
+Lord Erpingham was a Whig of the old school: he thought the Tory boroughs
+ought to be thrown open.  He was generally considered a sensible man.  He
+had read Blackstone, Montesquieu, Cowper's Poems, and _The Rambler_; and
+he was always heard with great attention in the House of Lords.  In his
+moral character he was a bon Vivant, as far as wine is concerned; for
+choice _eating_ he cared nothing.  He was good-natured, but close; brave
+enough to fight a duel, if necessary; and religious enough to go to church
+once a week--in the country.
+
+So far Lord Erpingham might seem modelled from one of Sir Walter's heroes:
+we must reverse the medal, and show the points in which he differed from
+those patterns of propriety.
+
+Like the generality of his class, he was peculiarly loose in his notions
+of women, though not ardent in pursuit of them.  His amours had been among
+opera-dancers, "because," as he was wont to say, "there was no d--d bore
+with _them._"  Lord Erpingham was always considered a high-minded man.
+People chose him as an umpire in quarrels; and told a story (which was not
+true) of his having held some state office for a whole year, and insisted
+on returning the emoluments.
+
+Such was Robert Earl of Erpingham.  During dinner, at which he displayed,
+to his mother's great delight, a most excellent appetite, he listened, as
+well as he might, considering the more legitimate occupation of the time
+and season, to Lady Erpingham's recitals of county history; her long
+answers to his brief inquiries whether old friends were dead and young
+ones married; and his countenance brightened up to an expression of
+interest--almost of intelligence--when he was told that birds were said to
+be plentiful.  As the servants left the room, and Lord Erpingham took his
+first glass of claret, the conversation fell upon Percy Godolphin.
+
+"He has been staying with us a whole fortnight," said Lady Erpingham;
+"and, by the by, he said he had met you in Italy, and mentioned your name
+as it deserved."
+
+"Indeed!  And did he really condescend to praise me?" said Lord
+Erpingham, with eagerness; for there was that about Godolphin, and his
+reputation for fastidiousness, which gave a rarity and a value to his
+praise, at least to lordly ears.  "Ah! he's a queer fellow; he led a very
+singular life in Italy."
+
+"So I have always heard," said Lady Erpingham.  "But of what description?
+was he very wild?"
+
+"No, not exactly: there was a good deal of mystery about him: he saw very
+few English, and those were chiefly men who played high.  He was said to
+have a great deal of learning and so forth."
+
+"Oh! then he was surrounded, I suppose, by those medalists and
+picture-sellers, and other impostors, who live upon such of our countrymen
+as think themselves blessed with a taste or afflicted with a genius," said
+Lady Erpingham; who, having lived with the wits and orators of the time,
+had caught mechanically their way of rounding a period.
+
+"Far from it!" returned the earl.  "Godolphin is much too deep a fellow
+for that; he's not easily taken in, I assure you.  I confess I don't like
+him the worse for that," added the close noble.  "But he lived with the
+Italian doctors and men of science; and encouraged, in particular, one
+strange fellow who affected sorcery, I fancy, or something very like it.
+Godolphin resided in a very lonely spot at Rome: and I believe
+laboratories, and caldrons, and all sorts of devilish things, were always
+at work there--at least so people said."
+
+"And yet," said Constance, "you thought him too sensible to be easily
+taken in?"
+
+"Indeed I do, Miss Vernon; and the proof of it is, that no man has less
+fortune or is made more of.  He plays, it is true, but only occasionally;
+though as a player at games of skill--piquet, billiards, whist,--he has no
+equal, unless it be Saville.  But then Saville, entre noun, is suspected
+of playing unfairly."
+
+"And you are quite sure," said the placid Lady Erpingham, "that Mr.
+Godolphin is only indebted to skill for his success?"
+
+Constance darted a glance of fire at the speaker.
+
+"Why, faith, I believe so!  No one ever accused him of a single shabby, or
+even suspicious trick; and indeed, as I said before, no one was ever more
+sought after in society, though he shuns it; and he's devilish right, for
+it's a cursed bore!"
+
+"My dear Robert! at your age!" exclaimed the mother.  "But," continued
+the earl, turning to Constance,--"but, Miss Vernon, a man may have his
+weak point; and the cunning Italian may have hit on Godolphin's, clever as
+he is in general; though, for my part, I will tell you frankly, I think he
+only encouraged him to mystify and perplex people, just to get talked
+of--vanity, in short.  He's a good-looking fellow that Godolphin--eh?"
+continued the earl, in the tone of a man who meant you to deny what he
+asserted.
+
+"Oh, beautiful!" said Lady Erpingham.  "Such a countenance!"
+
+"Deuced pale, though!--eh?--and not the best of figures: thin,
+narrow-shouldered, eh--eh?"
+
+Godolphin's proportions were faultless; but your strapping heroes think of
+a moderate-sized man as mathematicians define a point--declare that he has
+no length nor breadth whatsoever.
+
+"What say _you,_ Constance?" asked Lady Erpingham, meaningly.
+
+Constance felt the meaning, and replied calmly, that Mr. Godolphin
+appeared to her handsomer than any one she had seen lately.
+
+Lord Erpingham played with his neckcloth, and Lady Erpingham rose to leave
+the room.  "D--d fine girl!" said the earl, as he shut the door upon
+Constance;--"but d--d sharp!" added he, as he resettled himself on his
+chair.
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+CONSTANCE AT HER TOILET.--HER FEELINGS.--HER CHARACTER OF BEAUTY
+DESCRIBED.--THE BALL.--THE DUCHESS OF WINSTOUN AND HER DAUGHTER.--AN
+INDUCTION FROM THE NATURE OF FEMALE RIVALRIES.--JEALOUSY IN A
+LOVER.--IMPERTINENCE RETORTED.--LISTENERS NEVER HEAR GOOD OF
+THEMSELVES.--REMARKS ON THE AMUSEMENTS OF A PUBLIC ASSEMBLY.--THE
+SUPPER.--THE FALSENESS OF SEEMING GAIETY.--VARIOUS REFLECTIONS, NEW AND
+TRUE.--WHAT PASSES BETWEEN GODOLPHIN AND CONSTANCE.
+
+It was the evening of the ball to be given in honour of Lord Erpingham's
+arrival.  Constance, dressed for conquest, sat alone in her dressing-room.
+Her woman had just left her.  The lights still burned in profusion about
+the antique chamber (antique, for it was situated in the oldest part of
+the castle); those lights streamed full upon the broad brow and exquisite
+features of Miss Vernon.  As she leaned back in her chair--the fairy foot
+upon the low Gothic stool, and the hands drooping beside her
+despondingly--her countenance betrayed much, but not serene, thought; and,
+mixed with that thought, was something of irresolution and of great and
+real sadness.
+
+It is not, as I have before hinted, to be supposed that Constance's lot
+had been hitherto a proud one, even though she was the most admired beauty
+of her day; even though she lived with, and received adulation from, the
+high, and noble, and haughty of her land.  Often, in the glittering crowd
+that she attracted around her, her ear, sharpened by the jealousy and
+pride of her nature, caught words that dashed the cup of pleasure and of
+vanity with shame and anger.  "What! that _the_ Vernon's daughter?  Poor
+girl! dependent entirely on Lady Erpingham!  Ah! she'll take in some
+rich roturier, I hope."
+
+Such words from ill-tempered dowagers and faded beauties were no
+unfrequent interruption to her brief-lived and wearisome triumphs.  She
+heard manoeuvring mothers caution their booby sons, whom Constance would
+have looked into the dust had they dared but to touch her hand, against
+her untitled and undowried charms.  She saw cautious earls, who were all
+courtesy one night, all coldness another, as some report had reached them
+accusing their hearts of feeling too deeply her attractions, or, as they
+themselves suspected, for the first time, that a heart was not a word for
+a poetical nothing, and that to look on so beautiful and glorious a
+creature was sufficient to convince them, even yet, of the possibility of
+emotion.  She had felt to the quick the condescending patronage of
+duchesses and chaperons; the oblique hint; the nice and fine distinction
+which, in polished circles, divides each grade from the other, and allows
+you to be galled without the pleasure of feeling justified in offence.
+
+All this, which, in the flush and heyday of youth, and gaiety, and
+loveliness, would have been unnoticed by other women, rankled deep in the
+mind of Constance Vernon.  The image of her dying father, his complaints,
+his accusations (the justice of which she never for an instant
+questioned), rose up before her in the brightest hours of the dance and
+the revel.  She was not one of those women whose meek and gentle nature
+would fly what wounds them: Constance had resolved to conquer.  Despising
+glitter and gaiety, and show, she burned, she thirsted for power--a power
+which could retaliate the insults she fancied she had received, and should
+turn condescension into homage.  This object, which every casual word,
+every heedless glance from another, fixed deeper and deeper in her heart,
+took a sort of sanctity from the associations with which she linked
+it--her father's memory and his dying breath.
+
+At this moment in which we have portrayed her, all these restless, and
+sore, and haughty feelings were busy within; but they were combated, even
+while the more fiercely aroused, by one soft and tender thought--the image
+of Godolphin--of Godolphin, the spendthrift heir of a broken fortune and a
+fallen house.  She felt too deeply that she loved him; and, ignorant of
+his worldlier qualities, imagined that he loved her with all the devotion
+of that romance, and the ardour of that genius, which appeared to her to
+compose his character.  But this persuasion gave her now no delightful
+emotion.  Convinced that she ought to reject him, his image only coloured
+with sadness those objects and that ambition which she had hitherto
+regarded with an exulting pride.  She was not less bent on the lofty ends
+of her destiny; but the glory and the illusion had fallen from them.  She
+had taken an insight into futurity, and felt, that to enjoy power was to
+lose happiness.  Yet, with this full conviction, she forsook the happiness
+and clung to the power.  Alas! for our best and wisest theories, our
+problems, our systems, our philosophy!  Human beings will never cease to
+mistake the means for the end; and, despite the dogmas of sages, our
+conduct does not depend on our convictions.
+
+Carriage after carriage had rolled beneath the windows of the room where
+Constance sat, and still she moved not; until at length a certain
+composure, as if the result of some determination, stole over her
+features.  The brilliant and transparent hues returned to her cheek, and,
+as she rose and stood erect with a certain calmness and energy on her lip
+and forehead, perhaps her beauty had never seemed of so lofty and august a
+cast.  In passing through the chamber, she stopped for a moment opposite
+the mirror that reflected her stately shape in its full height.  Beauty is
+so truly the weapon of woman, that it is as impossible for her, even in
+grief, wholly to forget its effect, as it is for the flying warrior to
+look with indifference on the sword with which he has won his trophies or
+his fame.  Nor was Constance that evening disposed to be indifferent to
+the effect she should produce.  She looked on the reflection of herself
+with a feeling of triumph, not arising from vanity alone.
+
+And when did mirror ever give back a form more worthy of a Pericles to
+worship, or an Apelles to paint?  Though but little removed from the
+common height, the impression Constance always gave was that of a person
+much taller than she really was.  A certain majesty in the turn of the
+head, the fall of the shoulders, the breadth of the brow, and the
+exceeding calmness of the features, invested her with an air which I have
+never seen equalled by any one, but which, had Pasta been a beauty, she
+might have possessed.  But there was nothing hard or harsh in this
+majesty.  Whatsoever of a masculine nature Constance might have inherited,
+nothing masculine, nothing not exquisitely feminine, was visible in her
+person.  Her shape was rounded, and sufficiently full to show, that in
+middle age its beauty would be preserved by that richness and freshness
+which a moderate increase of the proportions always gives to the sex.  Her
+arms and hands were, and are, even to this day, of a beauty the more
+striking, because it is so rare.  Nothing in any European country is more
+uncommon than an arm really beautiful both in hue and shape.  In any
+assembly we go to, what miserable bones, what angular elbows, what red
+skins, do we see under the cover of those capacious sleeves, which are
+only one whit less ugly.  At the time I speak of, those coverings were not
+worn; and the white, round, dazzling arm of Constance, bare almost to the
+shoulder, was girded by dazzling gems, which at once set off, and were
+foiled by, the beauty of nature.  Her hair was of the most luxuriant, and
+of the deepest, black; and it was worn in a fashion--then uncommon,
+without being bizarre--now hackneyed by the plainest faces, though suiting
+only the highest order of beauty--I mean that simple and classic fashion
+to which the French have given a name borrowed from Calypso, but which
+appears to me suited rather to an intellectual than a voluptuous goddess.
+Her long lashes, and a brow delicately but darkly pencilled, gave
+additional eloquence to an eye of the deepest blue, and a classic contour
+to a profile so slightly aquiline, that it was commonly considered
+Grecian.  That necessary completion to all real beauty of either sex, the
+short and curved upper lip, terminated in the most dazzling teeth and the
+ripe and dewy under lip added to what was noble in her beauty that charm
+also which is exclusively feminine.  Her complexion was capricious; now
+pale, now tinged with the pink of the sea-shell, or the softest shade of
+the rose leaf: but in either it was so transparent, that you doubted which
+became her the most.  To these attractions, add a throat, a bust of the
+most dazzling whiteness, and the justest proportions; a foot, whose least
+beauty was its smallness, and a waist narrow--not the narrowness of
+tenuity or constraint;--but round, gradual, insensibly less in its
+compression:--and the person of Constance Vernon, in the bloom of her
+youth, is before you.
+
+She passed with her quiet and stately step from her room, through one
+adjoining it, and which we stop to notice, because it was her customary
+sitting-room when not with Lady Erpingham.  There had Godolphin, with the
+foreign but courtly freedom, the respectful and chivalric ease of his
+manners, often sought her; there had he lingered in order to detain her
+yet a moment and a moment longer from other company, seeking a sweet
+excuse in some remark on the books that strewed the tables, or the music
+in that recess, or the forest scene from those windows through which the
+moon of autumn now stole with its own peculiar power to soften and subdue.
+As these recollections came across her, her step faltered and her colour
+faded from its glow: she paused a moment, cast a mournful glance round the
+room, and then tore herself away, descended the lofty staircase, passed
+the stone hall, melancholy with old banners and rusted crests, and bore
+her beauty and her busy heart into the thickening and gay crowd.
+
+Her eye looked once more round for the graceful form of Godolphin: but he
+was not visible; and she had scarcely satisfied herself of this before
+Lord Erpingham, the hero of the evening, approached and claimed her hand.
+
+"I have just performed my duty," said he, with a gallantry of speech not
+common to him, "now for my reward.  I have danced the first dance with
+Lady Margaret Midgecombe: I come, according to your promise, to dance the
+second with you."
+
+There was something in these words that stung one of the morbid
+remembrances in Miss Vernon's mind.  Lady Margaret Midgecombe, in ordinary
+life, would have been thought a good-looking, vulgar girl:--she was a
+Duke's daughter and she was termed a Hebe.  Her little nose, and her fresh
+colour, and her silly but not unmalicious laugh, were called enchanting;
+and all irregularities of feature and faults of shape were absolutely
+turned into merits by that odd commendation, so common with us--"A deuced
+fine girl; none of your regular beauties."
+
+Not only in the county of ----shire, but in London, had Lady Margaret
+Midgecombe been set up as the rival beauty of Constance Vernon.  And
+Constance, far too lovely, too cold, too proud, not to acknowledge beauty
+in others, where it really existed, was nevertheless unaffectedly
+indignant at a comparison so unworthy; she even, at times, despised her
+own claims to admiration, since claims so immeasurably inferior could be
+put into competition with them.  Added to this sore feeling for Lady
+Margaret, was one created by Lady Margaret's mother.  The Duchess of
+Winstoun was a woman of ordinary birth--the daughter of a peer of great
+wealth but new family.  She had married, however, one of the most powerful
+dukes in the peerage;--a stupid, heavy, pompous man, with four castles,
+eight parks, a coal-mine, a tin-mine, six boroughs, and about thirty
+livings.  Inactive and reserved, the duke was seldom seen in public: the
+care of supporting his rank devolved on the duchess; and she supported it
+with as much solemnity of purpose as if she had been a cheesemonger's
+daughter.  Stately, insolent, and coarse; asked everywhere; insulting all;
+hated and courted; such was the Duchess of Winstoun, and such, perhaps,
+have been other duchesses before her.
+
+Be it understood that, at that day, Fashion had not risen to the despotism
+it now enjoys: it took its colouring from Power, not controlled it.  I
+shall show, indeed, how much of its present condition that Fashion owes to
+the Heroine of these Memoirs.  The Duchess of Winstoun could not now be
+that great person she was then: there is a certain good taste in Fashion
+which repels the mere insolence of flank--which requires persons to be
+either agreeable, or brilliant, or at least original--which weighs stupid
+dukes in a righteous balance and finds vulgar duchesses wanting.  But in
+lack of this new authority this moral sebastocrator between the Sovereign
+and the dignity hitherto considered next to the Sovereign's--her Grace of
+Winstoun exercised with impunity the rights of insolence.  She had taken
+an especial dislike to Constance:--partly because the few good judges of
+beauty, who care neither for rank nor report, had very unreservedly placed
+Miss Vernon beyond the reach of all competition with her daughter; and
+principally, because the high spirit and keen irony of Constance had given
+more than once to the duchess's effrontery so cutting and so public a
+check, that she had felt with astonishment and rage there was one woman in
+that world--that woman too unmarried--who could retort the rudeness of the
+Duchess of Winstoun.  Spiteful, however, and numerous were the things she
+said of Miss Vernon, when Miss Vernon was absent; and haughty beyond
+measure were the inclination of her head and the tone of her voice when
+Miss Vernon was present.  If, therefore, Constance was disliked by the
+duchess, we may readily believe that she returned the dislike.  The very
+name roused her spleen and her pride; and it was with a feeling all a
+woman's, though scarcely feminine in the amiable sense of the word, that
+she learned to whom the honour of Lord Erpingham's precedence had been
+(though necessarily) given.
+
+As Lord Erpingham led her to her place, a buzz of admiration and
+enthusiasm followed her steps.  This pleased Erpingham more than, at that
+moment, it did Constance.  Already intoxicated by her beauty, he was proud
+of the effect it produced on others, for that effect was a compliment to
+his taste.  He exerted himself to be agreeable; nay, more, to be
+fascinating: he affected a low voice; and he attempted--poor man!--to
+flatter.
+
+The Duchess of Winstoun and her daughter sat behind on an elevated bench.
+They saw with especial advantage the attentions with which one of the
+greatest of England's earls honoured the daughter of one of the greatest
+of England's orators.  They were shocked at his want of dignity.
+Constance perceived their chagrin, and she lent a more pleased and
+attentive notice to Lord Erpingham's compliments: her eyes sparkled and
+her cheek blushed: and the good folks around, admiring Lord Erpingham's
+immense whiskers, thought Constance in love.
+
+It was just at this time that Percy Godolphin entered the room.
+
+Although Godolphin's person was not of a showy order, there was something
+about him that always arrested attention.  His air; his carriage; his long
+fair locks; his rich and foreign habits of dress, which his high bearing
+and intellectual countenance redeemed from coxcombry; all, united, gave
+something remarkable and distinguished to his appearance; and the interest
+attached to his fortunes, and to his social reputation for genius and
+eccentricity, could not fail of increasing the effect he produced when his
+name was known.
+
+From the throng of idlers that gathered around him; from the bows of the
+great and the smiles of the fair; Godolphin, however, directed his whole
+notice--his whole soul--to the spot which was hallowed by Constance
+Vernon.  He saw her engaged with a man rich, powerful, and handsome.  He
+saw that she listened to her partner with evident interest--that he
+addressed her with evident admiration.  His heart sank within him; he felt
+faint and sick; then came anger--mortification; then agony and despair.
+All his former resolutions--all his prudence, his worldliness, his
+caution, vanished at once; he felt only that he loved, that he was
+supplanted, that he was undone.  The dark and fierce passions of his
+youth, of a nature in reality wild and vehement, swept away at once the
+projects and the fabrics of that shallow and chill philosophy he had
+borrowed from the world, and deemed the wisdom of the closet.  A cottage
+and a desert with Constance--Constance all his--heart and hand--would have
+been Paradise: he would have nursed no other ambition, nor dreamed of a
+reward beyond.  Such effect has jealousy upon us.  We confide, and we
+hesitate to accept a boon: we are jealous, and we would lay down life to
+attain it.
+
+"What a handsome fellow Erpingham is!" said a young man in a cavalry
+regiment.
+
+Godolphin heard and groaned audibly.
+
+"And what a devilish handsome girl he is dancing with!" said another
+young man, from Oxford.
+
+"Oh, Miss Vernon!--By Jove, Erpingham seems smitten.  What a capital thing
+it would be for her!"
+
+"And for him, too!" cried the more chivalrous Oxonian.
+
+"Humph!" said the officer.
+
+"I heard," renewed the Oxonian, "that she was to be married to young
+Godolphin.  He was staying here a short time ago.  They rode and walked
+together.  What a lucky fellow he has been.  I don't know any one I should
+so much like to see."
+
+"Hush!" said a third person, looking at Godolphin.
+
+Percy moved on.  Accomplished and self-collected as he usually was, he
+could not wholly conceal the hell within.  His brow grew knit and gloomy:
+he scarcely returned the salutations he received; and moving out of the
+crowd, he stole to a seat behind a large pillar, and, scarcely seen by any
+one, fixed his eyes on the form and movements of Miss Vernon.
+
+It so happened that he had placed himself in the vicinity of the Duchess
+of Winstoun, and within hearing of the conversation that I am about to
+record.
+
+The dance being over, Lord Erpingham led Constance to a seat close by Lady
+Margaret Midgecombe.  The duchess had formed her plan of attack; and,
+rising as she saw Constance within reach, approached her with an air that
+affected civility.
+
+"How do you do, Miss Vernon?  I am happy to see you looking so well.  What
+truth in the report, eh?"  And the duchess showed her teeth--videlicet,
+smiled.
+
+"What report does your grace allude to?"
+
+"Nay, nay; I am sure Lord Erpingham has heard it as well as myself; and I
+wish for your sake (a slight emphasis), indeed, for both your sakes, that
+it may be true."
+
+"To wait till the Duchess of Winstoun speaks intelligibly would be a waste
+of her time and my own," said the haughty Constance, with the rudeness in
+which she then delighted, and for which she has since become known.  Rut
+the duchess was not to be offended until she had completed her manoeuvre.
+
+"Well, now," said she, turning to Lord Erpingham, "I appeal to you; is not
+Miss Vernon to be married very soon to Mr. Godolphin?  I am sure (with an
+affected good-nature and compassion that stung Constance to the quick), I
+am sure I _hope_ so."
+
+"Upon my word you amaze me," said Lord Erpingham, opening to their fullest
+extent the large, round, hazel eyes for which he was so justly celebrated.
+"I never heard this before."
+
+"Oh! a secret as yet?" said the duchess; "very well!  I can keep a
+secret."
+
+Lady Margaret looked down, and laughed prettily.
+
+"I thought till now," said Constance, with grave composure, "that no
+person could be more contemptible than one who collects idle reports: I
+now find I was wrong: a person infinitely more contemptible is one who
+invents them."
+
+The rude duchess beat at her own weapons, blushed with anger even through
+her rouge: but Constance turned away, and, still leaning on Lord
+Erpingham's arm, sought another seat;--that seat, on the opposite side of
+the pillar behind which Godolphin sat, was still within his hearing.
+
+"Upon my word, Miss Vernon," said Erpingham, "I admire your spirit.
+Nothing like setting down those absurd people who try to tease one, and
+think one dares not retort.  But pray--I hope I'm not impertinent--pray,
+may I ask if this rumour have any truth in it?"
+
+"Certainly not," said Constance, with great effort, but in a clear tone.
+
+"No: I should have thought not--I should have thought not.  Godolphin's
+much too poor--much too poor for you.  Miss Vernon is not born to marry
+for love in a cottage,--is she?"
+
+Constance sighed.
+
+That soft, low tone thrilled to Godolphin's very heart.  He bent forward:
+he held his breath: he thirsted for her voice; for some tone, some word in
+answer; it came not at that moment.
+
+"You remember," renewed the earl,--"you remember Miss L----? no: she was
+before your time.  Well! she married S----, much such another fellow as
+Godolphin.  He had not a shilling: but he lived well: had a house in
+Mayfair; gave dinners; hunted at Melton, and so forth: in short, he played
+high.  She had about ten thousand pounds.  They married, and lived for two
+years so comfortably, you have no idea.  Every one envied them.  They did
+not keep a close carriage, but he used to drive her out to dinners in his
+French cabriolet.[1]  There was no show--no pomp: everything deuced neat,
+though; quite love in a cottage--only the cottage was in Curzon Street.
+At length, however, the cards turned; S---- lost everything; owed more
+than he could ever pay: we were forced to cut him; and his relation, Lord
+----, coming into the ministry a year afterwards, got him a place in the
+Customs.  They live at Brompton: he wears a pepper-and-salt coat, and she
+a mob-cap, with pink ribands: they have five hundred a year, and ten
+children.  Such was the fate of S----'s wife; such may be the fate of
+Godolphin's.  Oh, Miss Vernon could not marry _him!_"
+
+"You are right, Lord Erpingham," said Constance with emphasis; "but you
+take too much licence in expressing your opinion."
+
+Before Lord Erpingham could stammer forth his apology they heard a slight
+noise behind: they turned; Godolphin had risen.  His countenance, always
+inclined to a calm severity--for thought is usually severe in its outward
+aspect--bent now on both the speakers with so dark and menacing an aspect
+that the stout earl felt his heart stand still for a moment; and Constance
+was appalled as if it had been the apparition, and not the living form, of
+her lover that she bebeld.  But scarcely had they seen this expression of
+countenance ere it changed.  With a cold and polished smile, a relaxed
+brow and profound inclination of his form Godolphin greeted the two: and
+passing from his seat with a slow step glided among the crowd and
+vanished.
+
+What a strange thing, after all, is a great assembly!  An immense mob of
+persons, who feel for each other the profoundest indifference--met
+together to join in amusements which the large majority of them consider
+wearisome beyond conception.  How unintellectual, how uncivilised, such a
+scene, and such actors!  What a remnant of barbarous times, when people
+danced because they had nothing to say!  Were there nothing ridiculous in
+dancing, there would be nothing ridiculous in seeing wise men dance.  But
+that sight would be ludicrous because of the disparity between the mind
+and the occupation.  However, we have some excuse; we go to these
+assemblies to sell our daughters, or flirt with our neighbours' wives.  A
+ballroom is nothing more or less than a great market-place of beauty.  For
+my part, were I a buyer, I should like making my purchases in a less
+public mart.
+
+"Come, Godolphin, a glass of champagne," cried the young Lord Belvoir, as
+they sat near each other at the splendid supper.
+
+"With all my heart; but not from that bottle!  We must have a new one; for
+this glass is pledged to Lady Delmour, and I would not drink to her health
+but from the first sparkle!  Nothing tame, nothing insipid, nothing that
+has lost its first freshness, can be dedicated to one so beautiful and
+young."
+
+The fresh bottle was opened, and Godolphin bowed over his glass to Lord
+Belvoir's sister-a Beauty and a Blue.  Lady Delmour admired Godolphin, and
+she was flattered by a compliment that no one wholly educated in England
+would have had the gallant courage to utter across a crowded table.
+
+"You have been dancing?" said she.
+
+"No!"
+
+"What then?"
+
+"What then?" said Godolphin.  "Ah, Lady Delmour, do not ask."  The look
+that accompanied the word, supplied them with a meaning.  "Need I add,"
+said he, in a lower voice, "that I have been thinking of the most
+beautiful person present?"
+
+"Pooh," said Lady Delmour, turning away her head.  Now, that _pooh_ is a
+very significant word.  On the lips of a man of business, it denotes
+contempt for romance; on the lips of a politician it rebukes a theory.
+With that monosyllable, a philosopher massacres a fallacy: by those four
+letters a rich man gets rid of a beggar.  But in the rosy mouth of a woman
+the harshness vanishes, the disdain becomes encouragement.  "Pooh!" says
+the lady when you tell her she is handsome; but she smiles when she says
+it.  With the same reply she receives your protestation of love, and
+blushes as she receives.  With men it is the sternest, with women the
+softest, exclamation in the language.
+
+"Pooh!" said Lady Delmour, turning away her head:--and Godolphin was in
+singular spirits.  What a strange thing that we should call such hilarity
+from our gloom!  The stroke induces the flash; excite the nerves by
+jealousy, by despair, and with the proud you only trace the excitement by
+the mad mirth and hysterical laughter it creates.  Godolphin was charming
+comme un amour, and the young countess was delighted with his gallantry.
+
+"Did you ever love?" asked she, tenderly, as they sat alone after supper.
+
+"Alas, yes!" said he.
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Read Marmontel's story of the Four Phials: I have no other answer."
+
+"Oh, what a beautiful tale that is!  The whole history of a man's heart is
+contained in it."
+
+While Godolphin was thus talking with Lady Delmour, his whole soul was
+with Constance; of her only he thought, and on her he thirsted for
+revenge.  There is a curious phenomenon in love, showing how much vanity
+has to do with even the best species of it; when, for your mistress to
+prefer another, changes all your affection into hatred:--is it the loss of
+the mistress, or her preference to the other?  The last, to be sure: for
+if the former, you would only grieve--but jealousy does not make you
+grieve, it makes you enraged; it does not sadden, it stings.  After all,
+as we grow old, and look back on the "master passion," how we smile at the
+fools it made of us--at the importance we attach to it--of the millions
+that have been governed by it!  When we examine the passion of love, it is
+like examining the character of some great roan; we are astonished to
+perceive the littlenesses that belong to it.  We ask in wonder, "How come
+such effects from such a cause?"
+
+Godolphin continued talking sentiment with Lady Delmour, until her lord,
+who was very fond of his carriage horses, came up and took her away; and
+then, perhaps glad to be relieved, Percy sauntered into the ballroom,
+where, though the crowd was somewhat thinned, the dance was continued
+with that spirit which always seems to increase as the night advances.
+
+For my own part, I now and then look late in at a ball as a warning and
+grave memento of the flight of time.  No amusement belongs of right so
+essentially to the young, in their first youth,--to the unthinking, the
+intoxicated,--to those whose blood is an elixir.
+
+"If Constance be woman," said Godolphin to himself, as he returned to the
+ballroom, "I will yet humble her to my will.  I have not learned the
+science so long, to be now foiled in the first moment I have seriously
+wished to triumph."
+
+As this thought inspired and excited him, he moved along at some distance
+from, but carefully within the sight of Constance.  He paused by Lady
+Margaret Midgecombe.  He addressed her.  Notwithstanding the insolence and
+the ignorance of the Duchess of Winstoun, he was well received by both
+mother and daughter.  Some persons there are, in all times and in all
+spheres, who command a certain respect, bought neither by riches, rank,
+nor even scrupulous morality of conduct.  They win it by the reputation
+that talent alone can win them, and which yet is not always the reputation
+of talent.  No man, even in the frivolous societies of the great, obtains
+homage without certain qualities, which, had they been happily directed,
+would have conducted him to fame.  Had the attention of a Grammont, or of
+a ----, been early turned towards what ought to be the objects desired,
+who can doubt that, instead of the heroes of a circle, they might have
+been worthy of becoming names of posterity?
+
+Thus the genius of Godolphin had drawn around him an eclat which made even
+the haughtiest willing to receive and to repay his notice; and Lady
+Margaret actually blushed with pleasure when he asked her to dance.  A
+foreign dance, then only very partially known in England, had been called
+for: few were acquainted with it,--those only who had been abroad; and as
+the movements seemed to require peculiar grace of person, some even among
+those few declined, through modesty, the exhibition.
+
+To this dance Godolphin led Lady Margaret.  All crowded round to see the
+performers; and, as each went through the giddy and intoxicating maze,
+they made remarks on the awkwardness or the singularity, or the
+impropriety of the dance.  But when Godolphin began, the murmurs changed.
+The slow and stately measure then adapted to the steps, was one in which
+the graceful symmetry of his person might eminently display itself.  Lady
+Margaret was at least as well acquainted with the dance: and the couple
+altogether so immeasurably excelled all competitors, that the rest, as if
+sensible of it, stopped one after the other; and when Godolphin,
+perceiving that they were alone, stopped also, the spectators made their
+approbation more audible than approbation usually is in polished society.
+
+As Godolphin paused, his eyes met those of Constance.  There was not there
+the expression he had anticipated there was neither the anger of jealousy,
+nor the restlessness of offended vanity, nor the desire of conciliation,
+visible in those large and speaking orbs.  A deep, a penetrating, a sad
+inquiry seemed to dwell in her gaze,--seemed anxious to pierce into his
+heart, and to discover whether there she possessed the power to wound, or
+whether each had been deceived: so at least seemed that fixed and
+melancholy intenseness of look to Godolphin.  He left Lady Margaret
+abruptly: in an instant he was by the side of Constance.
+
+"You must be delighted with this evening," said he, bitterly: "wherever I
+go I hear your praises: every one admires you; and he who does not admire
+so much as worship you, _he_ alone is beneath your notice.  He--born to
+such shattered fortunes,--he indeed might never _aspire_ to that which
+titled and wealthy idiots deem they may _command,_--the hand of Constance
+Vernon."
+
+It was with a low and calm tone that Godolphin spoke.  Constance turned
+deadly pale: her frame trembled; but she did not answer immediately.  She
+moved to a seat retired a little from the busy crowd; Godolphin followed
+and sat himself beside her; and then, with a slight effort, Constance
+spoke.
+
+"You heard what was said, Mr. Godolphin, and I grieve to think you did.
+If I offended you, however, forgive me, I pray you; I pray
+sincerely--warmly.  God knows I have suffered myself enough from idle
+words, and from the slighting opinion with which this hard world visits
+the poor, not to feel deep regret and shame if I wound, by like means,
+another, more especially"--Constance's voice trembled,--"more especially
+_you!_"
+
+As she spoke, she turned her eyes on Godolphin, and they were full of
+tears.  The tenderness of her voice, her look, melted him at once.  Was it
+to him, indeed, that the haughty Constance addressed the words of kindness
+and apology?--to him whose intrinsic circumstances she had heard described
+as so unworthy of her, and, his reason told him, with such justice?
+
+"Oh, Miss Vernon!" said he, passionately; "Miss Vernon--Constance--dear,
+dear Constance! dare I call you so? hear me one word.  I love you with a
+love which leaves me no words to tell it.  I know my faults, my poverty,
+my unworthiness; but--but--may I--may I hope?"
+
+And all the woman was in Constance's cheek, as she listened.  That cheek,
+how richly was it dyed!  Her eyes drooped; her bosom heaved.  How every
+word in those broken sentences sank into her heart! never was a tone
+forgotten.  The child may forget its mother, and the mother desert the
+child: but never, never from a woman's heart departs the memory of the
+first confession of love from him whom she first loves!  She lifted her
+eyes, and again withdrew them, and again gazed.
+
+"This must not be," at last she said; "no, no! it is folly, madness in
+both!"
+
+"Not so; nay, not so!" whispered Godolphin, in the softest notes of a
+voice that could never be harsh.  "It may seem folly--madness if you will,
+that the brilliant and all-idolized Miss Vernon should listen to the vows
+of so lowly an adorer: but try me--prove me, and own--yes, you _will_ own
+some years hence, that that folly has been happy beyond the happiness of
+prudence or ambition."
+
+"This!" answered Constance, struggling with her emotions; "this is no spot
+or hour for such a conference.  Let us meet to-morrow--the western
+chamber."
+
+"And the hour?"
+
+"Twelve!"
+
+"And I may hope--till then?"
+
+Constance again grew pale; and in a voice that, though it scarcely left
+her lips, struck coldness and dismay into his sudden and delighted
+confidence, answered,
+
+"No, Percy, there is no hope!--none!"
+
+[1] Then uncommon.
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+THE INTERVIEW.--THE CRISIS OF A LIFE.
+
+The western chamber was that I have mentioned as the one in which
+Constance usually fixed her retreat, when neither sociability nor state
+summoned her to the more public apartments.  I should have said that
+Godolphin slept in the house; for, coming from a distance and through
+country roads, Lady Erpingham had proffered him that hospitality, and he
+had willingly accepted it.  Before the appointed hour, he was at the
+appointed spot.
+
+He had passed the hours till then without even seeking his pillow.  In
+restless strides across his chamber, he had revolved those words with
+which Constance had seemed to deny the hopes she herself had created.  All
+private and more selfish schemes or reflections had vanished, as by magic,
+from the mind of a man prematurely formed, but not yet wholly hardened in
+the mould of worldly speculation.  He thought no more of what he should
+relinquish in obtaining her hand; with the ardour of boyish and real love,
+he thought only of her.  It was as if there existed no world but the
+little spot in which she breathed and moved.  Poverty, privation, toil,
+the change of the manners and habits of his whole previous life, to those
+of professional enterprise and self-denial;--to all this he looked
+forward, not so much with calmness as with triumph.
+
+"Be but Constance mine!" said he again and again; and again and again
+those fatal words knocked at his heart, "No hope--none!" and he gnashed
+his teeth in very anguish, and muttered, "But mine she will not--she will
+never be!"
+
+Still, however, before the hour of noon, something of his habitual
+confidence returned to him.  He had succeeded, though but partially, in
+reasoning away the obvious meaning of the words; and he ascended to the
+chamber from the gardens, in which he had sought, by the air, to cool his
+mental fever, with a sentiment, ominous and doubtful indeed, but still
+removed from despondency and despair.
+
+The day was sad and heavy.  A low, drizzling rain, and labouring yet
+settled clouds, which denied all glimpse of the sky, and seemed cursed
+into stagnancy by the absence of all wind or even breeze, increased by
+those associations we endeavour in vain to resist, the dark and oppressive
+sadness of his thoughts.
+
+He paused as he laid his hand on the door of the chamber: he listened; and
+in the acute and painful life which seemed breathed into all his senses,
+he felt as if he could have heard,--though without the room,--the very
+breath of Constance; or known, as by an inspiration, the presence of her
+beauty.  He opened the door gently; all was silence and desolation for
+him--Constance was not there!
+
+He felt, however, as if that absence was a relief.  He breathed more
+freely, and seemed to himself more prepared for the meeting.  He took his
+station by the recess of the window: in vain--he could rest in no spot: he
+walked to and fro, pausing only for a moment as some object before him
+reminded him of past and more tranquil hours.  The books he had admired
+and which, at his departure, had been left in their usual receptacle at
+another part of the house, he now discovered on the tables: they opened of
+themselves at the passages he had read aloud to Constance: those pages, in
+his presence, she had not seemed to admire; he was inexpressibly touched
+to perceive that, in his absence, they had become dear to her.  As he
+turned with a beating heart from this silent proof of affection, he was
+startled by the sudden and almost living resemblance to Constance, which
+struck upon him in a full-length picture opposite--the picture of her
+father.  That picture, by one of the best of our great modern masters of
+the art, had been taken of Vernon in the proudest epoch of his prosperity
+and fame.  He was portrayed in the attitude in which he had uttered one of
+the most striking sentences of one of his most brilliant orations: the
+hand was raised, the foot advanced, the chest expanded.  Life, energy,
+command, flashed from the dark eye, breathed from the dilated nostril,
+broke from the inspired lip.  That noble brow--those modelled
+features--that air, so full of the royalty of genius--how startlingly did
+they resemble the softer lineaments of Constance!
+
+Arrested, in spite of himself, by the skill of the limner, and the
+characteristic of the portrait Godolphin stood, motionless and gazing,
+till the door opened, and Constance herself stood before him.  She smiled
+faintly, but with sweetness as she approached; and seating herself,
+motioned him to a chair at a little distance.  He obeyed the gesture in
+silence.
+
+"Godolphin!" said she, softly.  At the sound of her voice he raised his
+eyes from the ground, and fixed them on her countenance with a look so
+full of an imploring and earnest meaning, so expressive of the passion,
+the suspense of his heart, that Constance felt her voice cease at once.
+But he saw as he gazed how powerful had been his influence.  Not a vestige
+of bloom was on her cheek: her very lips were colourless: her eyes were
+swollen with weeping; and though she seemed very calm and self-possessed,
+all her wonted majesty of mien was gone.  The form seemed to shrink within
+itself.  Humbleness and sorrow--deep, passionate, but quiet sorrow--had
+supplanted the haughtiness and the elastic freshness of her beauty.  "Mr.
+Godolphin," she repeated, after a pause, "answer me truly and with
+candour; not with the world's gallantry, but with a sincere, a plain
+avowal.  Were you not--in your unguarded expressions last night--were you
+not excited by the surprise, the passion, of the moment?  Were you not
+uttering what, had you been actuated only by a calm and premeditated
+prudence, you would at least have suppressed?"
+
+"Miss Vernon," replied Godolphin, "all that I said last night, I now, in
+calmness, and with deliberate premeditation, repeat: all that I can dream
+of happiness is in your hands."
+
+"I would, indeed, that I could disbelieve you," said Constance,
+sorrowfully; "I have considered deeply on your words.  I am touched--made
+grateful--proud--yes, truly proud--by your confessed affection--but--"
+
+"Oh, Constance!" cried Godolphin; in a sudden and agonized voice--and
+rising, he flung himself impetuously at her feet--"Constance! do not
+reject me!"
+
+He seized her hand: it struggled not with his.  He gazed on her
+countenance: it was dyed in blushes; and before those blushes vanished,
+her agitation found relief in tears, which flowed fast and full.
+
+"Beloved!" said Godolphin, with a solemn tenderness, "why struggle with
+your heart?  That heart I read at this moment: _that_ is not averse to
+me."  Constance wept on.  "I know what you would say, and what you feel,"
+continued Godolphin: "you think that I--that we both are poor: that you
+could ill bear the humiliations of that haughty poverty which those born
+to higher fortunes so irksomely endure.  You tremble to link your fate
+with one who has been imprudent--lavish--selfish, if you will.  You recoil
+before you intrust your happiness to a man who, if he wreck that, can
+offer you nothing in return: no rank--no station--nothing to heal a
+bruised heart, or cover its wound, at least, in the rich disguises of
+power and wealth.  Am I not right, Constance?  Do I not read your mind?"
+
+"No!" said Constance with energy.  "Had I been born any man's daughter,
+but his from whom I take my name; were I the same in all things, mind and
+heart, save in one feeling, one remembrance, one object--that I am now;
+Heaven is my witness that I would not cast a thought upon poverty--upon
+privation: that I would--nay, I do--I do confide in your vows, your
+affection.  If you have erred, I know it not.  If any but you tell me you
+have erred, I believe them not.  You I trust wholly and implicitly.
+Heaven, I say, is my witness that, did I obey the voice of my selfish
+heart, I would gladly, proudly, share and follow your fortunes.  You
+mistake me if you think sordid and vulgar ambition can only influence me.
+No!  I could be worthy of you!  The daughter of John Vernon could be a
+worthy wife to the man of indigence and genius.  In your poverty I could
+soothe you; in your labour I could support you; in your reverses console,
+in your prosperity triumph.  But--but, it must not be.  Go,
+Godolphin--dear Godolphin!  There are thousands better and fairer than I
+am, who will do for you as I would have done; but who possess the power I
+have not--who, instead of sharing, can raise your fortunes.  Go!--and if
+it comfort, if it soothe you, believe that I have not been insensible to
+your generosity, your love.  My best wishes, my fondest prayers, my
+dearest hopes, are yours."
+
+Blinded by her tears, subdued by her emotions, Constance was still
+herself.  She rose; she extricated her hand from Godolphin's; she turned
+to leave the room.  But Godolphin, still kneeling, caught hold of her
+robe, and gently, but effectually detained her.
+
+"The picture you have painted," said he, "do not destroy at once.  You
+have portrayed yourself my soother, guide, restorer.  You _can,_ indeed
+you can, be this.  You do not know me, Constance.  Let me say one word for
+my self.  Hitherto, I have shunned fame and avoided ambition.  Life has
+seemed to me so short, and all that even glory wins so poor, that I have
+thought no labour worth the price of a single hour of pleasure and
+enjoyment.  For you, how joyfully will I renounce my code!  For myself I
+could ask no honour: for you, I will labour for all.  No toil shall be dry
+to me--no pleasure shall decoy.  I will renounce my idle and desultory
+pursuits.  I will enter the great public arena, where all who come armed
+with patience and with energy are sure to win.  Constance, I am not
+without talents, though they have slept within me; say but the word, and
+you know not what they can produce."
+
+An irresolution in Constance was felt as a sympathy by Godolphin; he
+continued,--
+
+"We are both desolate in the world, Constance; we are orphans--friendless,
+fortuneless.  Yet both have made our way without friends, and commanded
+our associates, though without fortune.  Does not this declare we have
+that within us which, when we are united, can still exalt or conquer our
+destiny?  And we--we--alone in the noisy and contentious world with which
+we strive--we shall turn, after each effort, to our own hearts, and find
+there a comfort and a shelter.  All things will bind us closer and closer
+to each other.  The thought of our past solitude, the hope of our future
+objects, will only feed the fountain of our present love.  And how much
+sweeter, Constance, will be honours to you, if we thus win them;
+sanctified as they will be by the sacrifices we have made; by the thought
+of the many hours in which we desponded, yet took consolation from each
+other; by the thought how we sweetened mortifications by sympathy, and
+made even the lowest successes noble by the endearing associations with
+which we allied them!  How much sweeter to you will be such honours than
+those which you might command at once, but accompanied by a cold heart;
+rendered wearisome because won with ease and low because undignified by
+fame!  Oh, Constance! am I not heard?  Have not love, nature, sense,
+triumphed?"
+
+As he spoke, he had risen gently, and wound his arms around her not
+reluctant form: her head reclined upon his bosom; her hand was surrendered
+to his; and his kiss stole softly and unchidden to her cheek.  At that
+instant, the fate of both hung on a very hair.  How different might the
+lot, the character, of each have been, had Constance's lips pronounced the
+words that her heart already recorded!  And she might have done so; but as
+she raised her eyes, the same object that had before affected Godolphin
+came vividly upon her, and changed, as by an electric shock, the whole
+current of her thoughts.  Full and immediately before her was the picture
+of her father.  The attitude there delineated, so striking at all times,
+seemed to Constance at that moment more than ever impressive, and even
+awful in the _livingness_ of its command.  It was the face of Vernon in
+the act of speech--of warning--of reproof; such as she had seen it often
+in private life; such as she had seen it in his bitter maledictions on his
+hollow friends at the close of his existence: nay, such as she had seen
+it,--only more fearful, and ghastly with the hues of death,--in his last
+hours; in those hours in which he had pledged her to the performance of
+his revenge, and bade her live not for love but the memory of her sire.
+
+With the sight of the face rushed upon her the dark and solemn
+recollections of that time and of that vow.  The weakness of love vanished
+before the returning force of a sentiment nursed through her earliest
+years, fed by her dreams, strengthened by her studies, and hardened by the
+daring energies of a nature lofty yet fanatical, into the rule, the end,
+nay, the very religion of life!  She tore herself away from the surprised
+and dismayed Godolphin; she threw herself on her knees before the picture;
+her lips moved rapidly; the rapid and brief prayer for forgiveness was
+over, and Constance rose a new being.  She turned to Godolphin, and,
+lifting her arm towards the picture, as she regarded, with her bright and
+kindling eyes, the face of her lover; she said:--
+
+"As you think now, thought he whose voice speaks to you from the canvas;
+he, who pursued the path that you would tread; who, through the same toil,
+the same pursuit, that you would endure, used the same powers and the same
+genius you would command; he, who won,--what you might win also at
+last,--the smile of princes, the trust of nobles, the shifting and sandy
+elevation which the best, the wisest, and greatest statesmen in this
+country, if unbacked by a sordid and caballing faction, can alone
+obtain;--he warns you from that hollow distinction,--from its wretched
+consummation.  Oh, Godolphin!" she continued, subdued, and sinking from a
+high-wrought but momentary paroxysm, uncommon to her collected character,
+"Oh, Godolphin!  I saw that man dying, deserted, lonely, cursed by his
+genius, ruined by his prosperity.  I saw him dying,--die,--of a broken and
+trampled heart.  Could I doom another victim to the same course, and the
+same perfidy, and the same fate?  Could I, with a silent heart, watch by
+that victim; could I, viewing his certain doom, elate him with false
+hopes?--No, no! fly from me,--from the thought of such a destiny.  Marry
+one who can bring you wealth, and support you with rank; _then_ be
+ambitious if you will.  Leave me to fulfil my doom,--my vow; and to think,
+however wretched I may be, that I have not inflicted a permanent
+wretchedness on you."
+
+Godolphin sprang forward; but the door closed upon his eyes; and he saw
+Constance--as Constance _Vernon_--no more.
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+A RARE AND EXQUISITE OF THE BEST (WORST) SCHOOL.--A CONVERSATION ON A
+THOUSAND MATTERS.--THE DECLENSION OF THE "SUI PROFUSUS" INTO THE "ALIENI
+APPETENS."
+
+There was, in the day I now refer to, a certain house in Chesterfield
+Street, Mayfair, which few young men anxious for the eclat of society
+passed without a wish for the acquaintance of the inmate.  To that small
+and dingy mansion, with its verandahs of dusky green, and its blinds
+perpetually drawn, there attached an interest, a consideration, and a
+mystery.  Thither, at the dusk of night, were the hired carriages of
+intrigue wont to repair, and dames to alight, careful seemingly of
+concealment, yet wanting, perhaps, even a reputation to conceal.  Few, at
+the early hours of morn, passed that street on their way home from some
+glittering revel without noticing some three or four chariots in
+waiting;--or without hearing from within the walls the sounds of
+protracted festivity.  That house was the residence of a man who had never
+done anything in public, and yet was the most noted personage in Society
+in early life, the all-accomplished Lovelace! in later years mingling
+the graces with the decayed heart and the want of principle of a Grammont.
+Feared, contemned, loved, hated, ridiculed, honoured, the very genius, the
+very personification, of a civilized and profligate life seemed embodied
+in Augustus Saville.  Hitherto we have spoken of, let us now describe him.
+
+Born to the poor fortunes and equivocal station of cadet in a noble but
+impoverished house, he had passed his existence in a round of lavish, but
+never inelegant, dissipation.  Unlike other men, whom youth, and money,
+and the flush of health, and aristocratic indulgence, allure to follies,
+which shock the taste as well as the morality of the wise, Augustus
+Saville had never committed an error which was not varnished by grace, and
+limited by a profound and worldly discretion.  A systematic votary of
+pleasure--no woman had ever through him lost her reputation or her sphere;
+whether it was that he corrupted into fortunate dissimulation the minds
+that he betrayed into guilt, or whether he chose his victims with so just
+a knowledge of their characters, and of the circumstances round them, that
+he might be sure the secrecy maintained by himself would scarcely be
+divulged elsewhere.  All the world attributed to Augustus Saville the most
+various and consummate success in that quarter in which success is most
+envied by the lighter part of the world: yet no one could say exactly who,
+amongst the many he addressed, had been the object of his triumph.  The
+same quiet, and yet victorious discretion waited upon all he did.  Never
+had he stooped to win celebrity from horses or from carriages; nothing in
+his equipages showed the ambition to be distinguished from another; least
+of all did he affect that most displeasing of minor ostentatious, that
+offensive exaggeration of neatness, that outre simplicity, which our young
+nobles and aspiring bankers so ridiculously think it bon ton to assume.
+No harness, industriously avoiding brass; no liveries, pretending to the
+tranquillity of a gentleman's dress; no panels, disdaining the armorial
+attributes of which real dignity should neither be ashamed nor
+proud--converted plain taste into a display of plainness.  He seldom
+appeared at races, and never hunted; though he was profound master of the
+calculations in the first, and was, as regarded the second, allowed to be
+one of the most perfect masters of horsemanship in his time.  So, in his
+chess, while he chose even sedulously what became him most, he avoided the
+appearance of coxcombry, by a disregard to minutiae.  He did not value
+himself on the perfection of his boot; and suffered a wrinkle in his coat
+without a sigh: yet, even the exquisites of the time allowed that no one
+was more gentlemanlike in the tout ensemble; and while he sought by other
+means than dress to attract, he never even in dress offended.  Carefully
+shunning the character of the professed wit, or the general talker, he was
+yet piquant, shrewd, and animated to the few persons whom he addressed, or
+with whom he associated: and though he had refused all offers to enter
+public life, he was sufficiently master of the graver subjects that
+agitated the times to impress even those practically engaged in them with
+a belief in his information and his talents.
+
+But he was born poor; and yet he had lived for nearly thirty years as a
+rich man!  What was his secret?--he had lived upon others.  At all games
+of science, he played with a masterly skill; and in those wherein luck
+preponderates, there are always chances for a cool and systematic
+calculation.  He had been, indeed, suspected of unfair play; but the
+charge had never cooled the eagerness with which he had been courted.
+With far better taste, and in far higher estimation than Brummell, he
+obtained an equal, though a more secret sway.  Every one was desirious to
+know him: without his acquaintance, the young debutant felt that he wanted
+the qualification to social success: by his intimacy, even vulgarity
+became the rage.  It was true that, as no woman's disgrace was confessedly
+traced to him, so neither was any man's ruin--save only in the doubtful
+instance of the unfortunate Johnstone.  He never won of any person,
+however ardent, more than a certain portion of his fortune--the rest of
+his undoing Saville left to his satellites; nay, even those who had in
+reality most reason to complain of him, never perceived his due share in
+their impoverishment.  It was common enough to hear men say, "Ah! Saville,
+I wish I had taken your advice, and left off while I had yet half my
+fortune!"  They did not accurately heed that the first half was Saville's;
+because the first half had excited, not ruined them.
+
+Besides this method of making money, so strictly social, Saville had also
+applied his keen intellect and shrewd sense to other speculations.  Cheap
+houses, cheap horses, fluctuations in the funds, all descriptions of
+property (except perhaps stolen goods), had passed under his earnest
+attention; and in most cases, such speculations had eminently succeeded.
+He was therefore now, in his middle age, and still unmarried, a man
+decidedly wealthy; having, without ever playing miser, without ever
+stinting a luxury, or denying a wish, turned nothing into something,
+poverty into opulence.
+
+It was noon; and Saville was slowly finishing his morning repast, and
+conversing with a young man stretched on a sofa opposite in a listless
+attitude.  The room was in perfect keeping with the owner: there was
+neither velvet, nor gilding, nor buhl, nor marquetrie--all of which would
+have been inconsistent with the moderate size of the apartment.  But the
+furniture was new, massive, costly, and luxurious without the ostentation
+of luxury.  A few good pictures, and several exquisite busts and figures
+in bronze, upon marble pedestals, gave something classic and graceful to
+the aspect of the room.  Annexed to the back drawing-room, looking over
+Lord Chesterfield's gardens, a small conservatory, filled with rich
+exotics, made the only feature in the apartment that might have seemed, to
+a fastidious person, effeminate or unduly voluptuous.
+
+Saville himself was about forty-seven years of age: of a person slight and
+thin, without being emaciated: a not ungraceful, though habitual stoop,
+diminished his height, which might be a little above the ordinary
+standard.  In his youth he had been handsome; but in his person there was
+now little trace of any attraction beyond that of a manner remarkably soft
+and insinuating: yet in his narrow though high forehead--his sharp
+aquiline nose, grey eye, and slightly sarcastic curve of lip, something of
+his character betrayed itself.  You saw, or fancied you saw in them the
+shrewdness, the delicacy of tact; the consciousness of duping others; the
+subtle and intuitive, yet bland and noiseless penetration into the
+characters around him, which made the prominent features of his mind.
+And, indeed, of all qualities, dissimulation is that which betrays itself
+the most often in the physiognomy.  A fortunate thing, that the long habit
+of betraying should find at times the index in which to betray itself.
+
+"But you don't tell me, my dear Godolphin," said Saville, as he broke the
+toast into his chocolate,--"you don't tell me how the world employed
+itself at Rome.  Were there any of the true calibre there? steady fellows,
+yet ardent, like myself?--men who make us feel our strength and put it
+forth--with whom we cannot dally nor idle--who require our coolness of
+head, clearness of memory, ingenuity of stratagem--in a word, men of my
+art--the art of play:--were there any such?"
+
+"Not many, but enough for honour," said Godolphin: "for myself, I have
+long forsworn gambling for profit."
+
+"Ah! I always thought you wanted that perseverance which belongs to
+strength of character.  And how stand your resources now?  Sufficient to
+recommence the world here with credit and eclat?"
+
+"Ay, were I so disposed, Saville.  But I shall return to Italy.  Within a
+month hence, I shall depart."
+
+"What! and only just arrived in town!  An heir in possession!"
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"The reputation of having succeeded to a property, the extent of which, if
+wise, you will tell to no one!  Are you so young, Godolphin, as to imagine
+that it signifies one crumb of this bread what be the rent-roll of your
+estate, so long as you can obtain credit for any sum to which you are
+pleased to extend it?  Credit! beautiful invention!--the moral new world
+to which we fly when banished from the old.  Credit!--the true charity of
+Providence, by which they who otherwise would starve live in plenty, and
+despise the indigent rich.  Credit!--admirable system, alike for those who
+live on it and the wiser few who live by it.  Will you borrow some money
+of me, Godolphin?"
+
+"At what percentage?"
+
+"Why, let me see: funds are low; I'll be moderate.  But stay; be it with
+you as I did with George Sinclair.  You shall have all you want, and pay
+me with a premium, when you marry an heiress.  Why, roan, you wince at the
+word 'marry!'"
+
+"'Tis a sore subject, Saville: one that makes a man think of halters."
+
+"You are right--I recognise my young pupil.  Your old play-writers talked
+nonsense when they said men lost liberty of person by marriage.  Men lose
+liberty, but it is the liberty of the mind.  We cease to be independent of
+the world's word, when we grow respectable with a wife, a fat butler, two
+children, and a family coach.  It makes a gentleman little better than a
+grocer or a king!  But you have seen Constance Vernon.  Why, out on this
+folly, Godolphin!  You turn away.  Do you fancy that I did not penetrate
+your weakness the moment you mentioned her name?--still less, do you
+fancy, my dear young friend, that I, who have lived through nearly half a
+century, and know our nature, and the whole thermometer of our blood,
+think one jot the worse of you for forming a caprice, or a passion, if you
+will--for a woman who would set an anchoret, or, what is still colder, a
+worn out debauchee, on fire?  Bah! Godolphin, I am wiser than you take me
+for.  And I will tell you more.  For your sake, I am _happy_ that you have
+incurred already this, our common folly (which we all have once in a
+life), and that the fit is over.  I do not pry into your secrets; I know
+their delicacy, I do not ask which of you drew back; for, to have gone
+forward, to have married, would have been madness in both.  Nay, it was an
+_impossibility_: it could not have happened to my pupil; the ablest, the
+subtlest, the wisest of my pupils.  But, however it was broken off, I
+repeat that I am glad it happened.  One is never sure of a man's wisdom,
+till he has been really and vainly in love.  You know what that moralizing
+lump of absurdity, Lord Edouard, has said in the Julie--'the path of the
+passions conducts us to philosophy!'  It is true, very true; and now that
+the path has been fairly trod, the goal is at hand.  _Now,_ I can confide
+in your steadiness; now, I can feel that you will run no chance in future,
+of over-appreciating that bauble, Woman.  You will beg, borrow, steal, and
+exchange or lose the jewel, with the same delicious excitement, coupled
+with the same steady indifference, with which we play at a more scientific
+game, and for a more comprehensive reward.  I say more comprehensive
+reward: for how many women may we be able to buy by a judicious bet on the
+odd trick!"
+
+"Your turn is sudden," said Godolphin, smiling; "and there is some justice
+in your reasoning.  The fit _is_ over; and if ever I can be wise, I have
+entered on wisdom now.  But talk of this no more."
+
+"I will not," said Saville, whose unerring tact had reached just the point
+where to stop, and who had led Godolphin through just that vein of
+conversation, half sentimentalising, half sensible, all profligate, which
+seldom fails to win the ear of a man both of imagination and of the world.
+"I will not; and, to vary the topic, I will turn egoist, and tell you
+_my_ adventures."
+
+With this, Saville began a light and amusing recital of his various and
+singular life for the last three years.  Anecdote, jest, maxim, remark,
+interspersed, gave a zest and piquancy to the narration.  An accomplished
+roue always affects to moralise; it is a part of his character.  There is
+a vague and shrewd sentiment that pervades his morale and his system.
+Frequent excitement, and its attendant relaxation; the conviction of the
+folly of all pursuits; the insipidity of all life; the hollowness of all
+love; the faithlessness in all ties; the disbelief in all worth; these
+consequences of a dissipated existence on a thoughtful mind, produce some
+remarkable, while they make so many wretched, characters.  They coloured
+some of the most attractive prose among the French, and the most
+fascinating verse in the pages of Byron.  It might be asked, by a profane
+inquirer (and I have touched on this before), what effect a life nearly
+similar--a life of luxury, indolence, lassitude, profuse, but heartless
+love, imparted to the deep and touching wisdom in his page, whom we
+consider the wisest of men, and who has left us the most melancholy of
+doctrines?
+
+It was this turn of mind that made Savill's conversation peculiarly
+agreeable to Godolphin in his present humour; and the latter invested it,
+from his own mood, with a charm which in reality it wanted.  For, as I
+shall show, in Godolphin, what deterioration the habits of frivolous and
+worldly life produce on the mind of a man of genius, I show only in
+Saville the effect they produce on a man of sense.
+
+"Well, Godolphin," said Saville, as he saw the former rise to depart; "you
+will at least dine with me to-day--a punctual eight.  I think I can
+promise you an agreeable evening.  The Linettini, and that dear little
+Fanny Millinger (your old flame), are coming; and I have asked old
+Stracey, the poet, to say bons mots for them.  Poor old Stracey!  He goes
+about to all his former friends and fellow-liberals, boasting of his
+favour with the Great, and does not see that we only use him as we would a
+puppet-show or a dancing-dog."
+
+"What folly," said Godolphin, "it is in any man of genius (not also of
+birth) to think the Great of this country can possibly esteem him!
+Nothing can equal the secret enmity with which dull men regard an
+intellect above their comprehension.  Party politics, and the tact, the
+shifting, the commonplace that Party politics alone require; these they
+can appreciate; and they feel respect for an orator, even though he be not
+a county member; for he can assist them in their paltry ambition for place
+and pension: but an author, or a man of science, the rogues positively
+jeer at him!"
+
+"And yet," said Saville, "how few men of letters perceive a truth so
+evident to us, so hackneyed even in the conversations of society!  For a
+little reputation at a dinner table, for a coaxing nobe from some titled
+demirep affecting the De Stael, they forget not only to be glorious but
+even to be respectable.  And this, too, not only for so petty a
+gratification, but for one that rarely lasts above a London season.  We
+allow the low-born author to be the lion this year; but we dub him a bore
+the next.  We shut our doors upon his twice-told jests, and send for the
+Prague minstrels to sing to us after dinner instead."
+
+"However," said Godolphin, "it is only poets you find so foolish as to be
+deceived by you.  There is not a single prose writer of real genius so
+absurd."
+
+"And why is that?"
+
+"Because," replied Godolphin, philosophising, "poets address themselves
+more to women than men; and insensibly they acquire the weaknesses which
+they are accustomed to address.  A poet whose verses delight the women
+will be found, if we closely analyse his character, to be very like a
+woman himself."
+
+"You don't love poets?" said Saville.
+
+"The glory of old has departed from them.  I mean less from their pages
+than their minds.  We have plenty of beautiful poets, but how little
+poetry breathing of a great soul!"
+
+Here the door opened, and a Mr. Glosson was announced.  There entered a
+little, smirking, neat-dressed man, prim as a lawyer or a house-agent.
+
+"Ah, Glosson, is that you?" said Saville, with something like animation:
+"sit down, my good sir,--sit down.  Well! well! (rubbing his bands); what
+news? what news?"
+
+"Why, Mr. Saville, I think we may get the land from old ----.  He has the
+right of the job.  I have been with him all this morning.  He asks six
+thousand pounds for it.
+
+"The unconscionable dog!  He got it from the crown for two."
+
+"Ah, very true,--very true: but you don't see, sir,--you don't see, that
+it is well worth nine.  Sad times,--sad times: jobs from the crown are
+growing scarcer every day, Mr. Saville."
+
+"Humph! that's all a chance, a speculation.  Times are bad indeed, as you
+say: no money in the market; go, Glosson; offer him five; your percentage
+shall be one per cent. higher than if I pay six thousand, and shall be
+counted up to the latter sum."
+
+"He! he! he! sir!" grinned Glosson; "you are fond of your joke, Mr.
+Saville."
+
+"Well, now; what else in the market? never mind my friend: Mr.
+Godolphin--Mr. Glosson; now all gene is over; proceed,--proceed."
+
+Glosson hummed, and bowed, and hummed again, and then glided on to speak
+of houses, and crown lands, and properties in Wales, and places at court
+(for some of the subordinate posts at the palace were then--perhaps are
+now--regular matter of barter); and Saville, bending over the table, with
+his thin delicate hands clasped intently, and his brow denoting his
+interest, and his sharp shrewd eye fixed on the agent, furnished to the
+contemplative Godolphin a picture which he did not fail to note, to
+moralise on, to despise!
+
+What a spectacle is that of the prodigal rake, hardening and sharpening
+into the grasping speculator!
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+FANNY MILLINGER ONCE MORE.--LOVE.--WOMAN.--BOOKS.--A HUNDRED TOPICS
+TOUCHED ON THE SURFACE.--GODOLPHIN'S STATE OF MIND MORE MINUTELY
+EXAMINED.--THE DINNER AT SAVILLE'S.
+
+Godolphin went to see and converse with Fanny Millinger.
+
+She was still unmarried, and still the fashion.  There was a sort of
+allegory of real life, in the manner in which, at certain epochs, our
+Idealist was brought into contact with the fair actress of ideal
+creations.  There was, in short, something of a moral in the way these two
+streams of existence--the one belonging to the Actual, the other to the
+Imaginary--flowed on, crossing each other at stated times.  Which was the
+more really imaginative--the life of the stage, or that of the world's
+stage?  The gay Fanny was rejoiced to welcome back again her early lover.
+She ran on, talking of a thousand topics, without remarking the absent
+mind and musing eye of Godolphin, till he himself stopped her somewhat
+abruptly:--
+
+"Well, Fanny, well, and what do you know of Saville?  You have grown
+intimate with him, eh?  We shall meet at his house this evening."
+
+"Oh, yes, he is a charming person in his little way; and the only man who
+allows me to be a friend without dreaming of becoming a lover.  Now that's
+what I like.  We poor actresses have so much would-be love in the course
+of our lives, that a little friendship now and then is a novelty which
+other and soberer people can never appreciate.  On reading Gil Blas the
+other day--I am no great reader, as you may remember--I was struck by that
+part in which the dear Santillane assures us that there was never any love
+between him and Laura the actress.  I thought it so true to nature, so
+probable, that they should have formed so strong an intimacy for each
+other, lived in the same house, had every opportunity for love, yet never
+loved.  And it was exactly because she was an actress, and a light
+good-for-nothing creature that it so happened; the very multiplicity of
+lovers prevented her falling in love; the very carelessness of her life,
+poor girl, rendered a friend so charming to her.  It would have spoiled
+the friend to have made him an adorer; it would have turned the rarity
+into the every-day character.  Now, so it is with me and Saville; I like
+his wit, he likes my good temper.  We see each other as often as if we
+were in love; and yet I do not believe it even possible that he should
+ever kiss my hand.  After all," continued Fanny, laughing, "love is not so
+necessary to us women as people think.  Fine writers say, 'Oh, men have a
+thousand objects, women but one!' That's nonsense, dear Percy; women have
+their thousand objects too.  They have not the bar, but they have the
+milliner's shop; they can't fight, but they can sit by the window and
+embroider a work-bag; they don't rush into politics, but they plunge their
+souls into love for a parrot or a lap-dog.  Don't let men flatter
+themselves; Providence has been just as kind in that respect to one sex as
+to the other; our objects are small, yours great; but a small object may
+occupy the mind just as much as the loftiest."
+
+"Ours great! pshaw!" said Godolphin, who was rather struck with Fanny's
+remarks; "there is nothing great in those professions which man is pleased
+to extol.  Is selfishness great?  Are the low trickery, the organised lies
+of the bar, a great calling?  Is the mechanical slavery of the
+soldier--fighting because he is in the way of fighting, without knowing
+the cause, without an object, save a dim, foolish vanity which he calls
+glory, and cannot analyse--is that a great aim and vocation?  Well: the
+senate! look at the outcry which wise men make against the loathsome
+corruption of that arena; then look at the dull hours,--the tedious talk,
+the empty boasts, the poor and flat rewards, and tell me where is the
+greatness?  No, Fanny! the embroidered work-bag, and the petted parrot,
+afford just as great--morally great--occupations as those of the bar, the
+army, the senate.  It is only the frivolous who talk of frivolities; there
+is nothing frivolous; all earthly occupations are on a par--alike
+important if they alike occupy; for to the wise all are poor and
+valueless."
+
+"I fancy you are very wrong," said the actress, pressing her pretty
+fingers to her forehead, as if to understand him; "but I cannot tell you
+why, and I never argue.  I ramble on in my odd way, casting out my shrewd
+things without defending them if any one chooses to quarrel with them.
+What I do I let others do.  My maxim in talk is my maxim in life.  I claim
+liberty for myself, and give indulgence to others."
+
+"I see," said Godolphin, "that you have plenty of books about you, though
+you plead not guilty to reading.  Do you learn your philosophy from them?
+for I think you have contracted a vein of reflection since we parted which
+I scarcely recognise as an old characteristic."
+
+"Why," answered Fanny, "though I don't read, I skim.  Sometimes I canter
+through a dozen novels in a morning.  I am disappointed, I confess, in all
+these works; I want to see more real knowledge of the world than they ever
+display.  They tell us how Lord Arthur looked, and Lady Lucy dressed, and
+what was the colour of those curtains, and these eyes, and so forth; and
+then the better sort, perhaps, do also tell us what the heroine felt as
+well as wore, and try with might and main to pull some string of the
+internal machine; but still I am not enlightened, not touched.  I don't
+recognise men and women; they are puppets with holiday phrases: and I tell
+you what, Percy, these novelists make the last mistake you would suppose
+them guilty of; they have not romance enough in them to paint the truths
+of society.  Old gentlemen say novels are bad teachers of life, because
+they make it too ideal; quite the reverse: novels are too trite! too
+superficial!  Their very talk about love, and the fuss they make about it,
+show how shallow real romance is with them; for they say nothing new on
+it, and real romance is for ever striking out new thoughts.  Am I not
+right, Percy?--No! life, be it worldly as it may, has a vast deal of
+romance in it.  Every one of us (even poor I) have a mine of thoughts, and
+fancies, and wishes, that books are too dull and commonplace to reach the
+heart is a romance in itself."
+
+"A philosophical romance, my Fanny; full of mysteries and conceits, and
+refinements, mixed up with its deeper passages.  But how came you so
+wise?"
+
+"Thank you!" answered Fanny, with a profound curtsey.  "The fact
+is--though you, as in duty bound, don't perceive it--that I am older than
+I was when we last met.  I reflect where I then felt.  Besides, the stage
+fills our heads with a half sort of wisdom, and gives us that strange
+melange of shrewd experience and romantic notions which is, in fact, the
+real representation of nine human hearts out of ten.  Talking of books, I
+want some one to write a novel, which shall be a metaphysical Gil Blas;
+which shall deal more with the mind than Le Sage's book, and less with the
+actions; which shall make its hero the creature of the world, but a
+different creation, though equally true; which shall give a faithful
+picture in the character of one man of the aspect and the effects of our
+social system; making that man of a better sort of clay than the amusing
+lacquey was, and the produce of a more artificial grade of society.  The
+book I mean would be a sadder one than Le Sage's but equally faithful to
+life."
+
+"And it would have more of romance, if I rightly understand what you mean?"
+
+"Precisely: romance of idea as well as incident--natural romance.  By the
+way, how few know what natural romance is: so that you feel the ideas in a
+book or play are true and faithful to the characters they are ascribed to,
+why mind whether the incidents are probable?  Yet common readers only go
+by the incidents; as if the incidents in three-fourths of Shakspeare's
+plays were even ordinarily possible!  But people have so little nature in
+them, that they don't know what is natural!"
+
+Thus Fanny ran on, in no very connected manner; stringing together those
+remarks which, unless I am mistaken, show how much better an uneducated,
+clever girl, whose very nature is a quick perception of art, can play the
+critic, then the pedants who assume the office.
+
+But it was only for the moment that the heavy heart of Godolphin could
+forget its load.  It was in vain that he sought to be amused while yet
+smarting under the freshness of regret.  A great shock had been given to
+his nature; he had loved against his will; and as we have seen, on his
+return to the Priory, he had even resolved on curing himself of a passion
+so unprofitable and unwise.  But the jealousy of a night had shivered into
+dust a prudence which never of right belonged to a very ardent and
+generous nature: that jealousy was soothed, allayed; but how fierce, how
+stunning was the blow that succeeded it!  Constance had confessed love,
+and yet had refused him--for ever!  Clear and noble as to herself her
+motives might seem in that refusal, it was impossible that they should
+appear in the same light to Godolphin.  Unable to penetrate into the
+effect which her father's death-bed and her own oath had produced on the
+mind of Constance; how indissolubly that remembrace had united itself with
+all her schemes and prospects for the future; how marvellously, yet how
+naturally, it had converted worldly ambition into a sacred duty;--unable,
+I say, to comprehend all these various, and powerful, and governing
+motives, Godolphin beheld in her refusal only the aversion to share his
+slender income, and the desire for loftier station.  He considered,
+therefore, that sorrow was a tribute to her unworthy of himself; he deemed
+it a part of his dignity to strive to forget.  That hallowed sentiment
+which, in some losses of the heart, makes it a duty to remember, and
+preaches a soothing and soft lesson from the very text of regret, was not
+for the wrung and stricken soul of Godolphin.  He only strove to dissipate
+his grief, and shut out from his mental sight the charmed vision of the
+first, the only woman he had deeply loved.
+
+Godolphin felt, too, that the sole impulse which could have united the
+fast-expiring energy and enterprise of his youth to the ambition of life
+was for ever gone.  With Constance--with the proud thoughts that belonged
+to her--the aspirings after earthly honours were linked, and with her were
+broken.  He felt his old philosophy--the love of ease, the profound
+contempt for fame,--close, like the deep waters over those glittering
+hosts for whose passage they had been severed for a moment--whelming the
+crested and gorgeous visions for ever beneath the wave!  Conscious of his
+talents--nay, swayed to and fro by the unquiet stirrings of no common
+genius--Godolphin yet foresaw that he was not henceforth destined to play
+a shining part in the crowded drama of life.  His career was already
+closed; he might be contented, prosperous, happy, but never great.  He had
+seen enough of authors, and of the thorns that beset the paths of
+literature, to experience none of those delusions which cheat the blinded
+aspirer into the wilderness of publication--that mode of obtaining fame
+and hatred to which those who feel unfitted for more bustling concerns are
+impelled.  Write he might: and he was fond (as disappointment increased
+his propensities to dreaming) of brightening his solitude with the golden
+palaces and winged shapes that lie glassed within the fancy--the soul's
+fairy-land.  But the vision with him was only evoked one hour to be
+destroyed the next.  Happy had it been for Godolphin, and not unfortunate
+perhaps for the world, had he learned at that exact moment the true motive
+for human action which he afterwards, and too late, discovered.  Happy had
+it been for him to have learned that there is an ambition to do good--an
+ambition to raise the wretched as well as to rise.
+
+Alas!--either in letters or in politics, how utterly poor, barren, and
+untempting, is every path that points upward to the mockery of public
+eminence, when looked upon by a soul that has any real elements of wise or
+noble; unless we have an impulse within, which mortification chills not--a
+reward without, which selfish defeat does not destroy.
+
+But, unblest by one friend really wise or good, spoilt by the world,
+soured by disappointment, Godolphin's very faculties made him inert, and
+his very wisdom taught him to be useless.  Again and again--as the spider
+in some cell where no winged insect ever wanders, builds and rebuilds his
+mesh,--the scheming heart of the Idealist was doomed to weave net after
+net for those visions of the Lovely and the Perfect which can never
+descend to the gloomy regions wherein mortality is cast.  The most common
+disease to genius is nympholepsy--the saddening for a spirit that the
+world knows not.  Ah! how those outward disappointments which should cure,
+only feed the disease!
+
+The dinner at Saville's was gay and lively, as such entertainments with
+such participators usually are.  If nothing in the world is more heavy
+than your formal banquet,--nothing, on the other hand, is more agreeable
+than those well-chosen laissez aller feasts at which the guests are as
+happily selected as the wines; where there is no form, no reserve, no
+effort; and people having met to sit still for a few hours are willing to
+be as pleasant to each other as if they were never to meet again.  Yet the
+conversation in all companies not literary turns upon persons rather than
+things; and your wits learn their art only in the School for Scandal.
+
+"Only think, Fanny," said Saville, "of Clavers turning beau in his old
+age!  He commenced with being a jockey; then he became an electioneerer;
+then a Methodist parson; then a builder of houses; and now be has dashed
+suddenly up to London, rushed into the clubs, mounted a wig, studied an
+ogle, and walks about the Opera House swinging a cane, and, at the age of
+fifty-six, punching young minors in the side, and saying tremulously,
+"_We_ young fellows!"
+
+"He hires pages to come to him in the Park with three-cornered notes,"
+said Fanny, "he opens each with affected nonchalance; looks full at the
+bearer; and cries aloud-'Tell your mistress I cannot refuse her:'--then
+canters off, with the air of a man persecuted to death!"
+
+"But did you see what an immense pair of whiskers Chester has mounted?"
+
+"Yes," answered a Mr. De Lacy; "A---- says he has cultivated them in order
+to 'plant out' his ugliness."
+
+"But vy _you_ no talk, Monsieur de Dauphin?" said the Linettini gently,
+turning to Percy; "you ver silent."
+
+"Unhappily, I have been so long out of town that these anecdotes of the
+day are caviare to me."
+
+"But so," cried Saville, "would a volume of French Memoirs be to any one
+that took it up for the first time; yet the French Memoirs amuse one
+exactly as much as if one had lived with the persons written of.  Now that
+ought to be the case with conversations upon persons.  I flatter myself,
+Fanny, that you and I hit off characters so well by a word or two, that no
+one who hears us wants to know anything more about them."
+
+"I believe you," said Godolphin; "and that is the reason you never talk of
+yourselves."
+
+"Bah!  Apropos of egoism, did you meet Jack Barabel in Rome?"
+
+"Yes, writing his travels.  'Pray,' said he to me (seizing me by the
+button) in the Coliseum, 'What do you think is the highest order of
+literary composition?' 'Why, an epic, I fancy,' said I; 'or perhaps a
+tragedy, or a great history, or a novel like Don Quixote.' 'Pooh!' quoth
+Barabel, looking important, 'there's nothing so high in literature as a
+good book of travels;' then sinking his voice into a whisper and laying
+his finger wisely on his nose, he hissed out, 'I have a quarto, sir, in
+the press!'"
+
+"Ha! ha!" laughed Stracey, the old wit, picking his teeth, and speaking
+for the first time; "if you tell Barabel you have seen a handsome woman,
+he says, mysteriously frowning, 'Handsome, sir! has she travelled?--answer
+me that!'"
+
+"But have you seen Paulton's new equipage?  Brown carriage, brown
+liveries, brown harness, brown horses, while Paulton and his wife sit
+within dressed in brown cap-a-pie.  The best of it is that Paulton went to
+his coachmaker, to order his carriage, saying, 'Mr. Houlditch, I am
+growing old--too old to be eccentric any longer; I must have something
+remarkably plain;' and to this hour Paulton goes _brown_-ing about the
+town, crying out to every one, 'Nothing like simplicity, believe me.'"
+
+"He discharged his coachman for wearing white gloves instead of brown,"
+said Stracey.  "'What do you mean, sir,' cried he, 'with your d--d showy
+vulgarities?--don't you see me toiling my soul out to be plain and quiet,
+and you must spoil all, by not being _brown_ enough!'"
+
+"Ah, Godolphin, you seem pensive," whispered Fanny; "yet we are tolerably
+amusing, too."
+
+"My dear Fanny," answered Godolphin, rousing himself, "the dialogue is
+gay, the actors know their parts, the lights are brilliant; but--the
+scene--the scene cannot shift for me!  Call it what you will, I am not
+deceived.  I see the paint and the canvas, but--and yet, away these
+thoughts!  Shall I fill your glass, Fanny?"
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+AN EVENT OF GREAT IMPORTANCE TO THE PRINCIPAL ACTORS IN THIS
+HISTORY.--GODOLPHIN A SECOND TIME LEAVES ENGLAND.
+
+Goldolphin was welcomed with enthusiasm by the London world.  His graces,
+his manners, his genius, his bon ton, and his bonnes fortunes, were the
+theme of every society.  Verses imputed to him,--some erroneously, some
+truly,--were mysteriously circulated from hand to hand; and every one
+envied the fair inspirers to whom they were supposed to be addressed.
+
+It is not my intention to reiterate the wearisome echo of novelists, who
+descant on fashion and term it life.  No description of rose-coloured
+curtains and buhl cabinets--no miniature paintings of boudoirs and
+salons--no recital of conventional insipidities, interlarded with affected
+criticisms, and honoured by the name of dramatic dialogue, shall lend
+their fascination to these pages.  Far other and far deeper aims are mine
+in stooping to delineate the customs and springs of polite life.  The
+reader must give himself wholly up to me; he must prepare to go with me
+through the grave as through the gay, and unresistingly to thread the dark
+and subtle interest which alone I can impart to these memoirs, or--let him
+close the book at once.  I promise him novelty; but it is not, when duly
+scanned, a novelty of a light and frivolous cast.
+
+But throughout that routine of dissipation in which he chased the phantom
+Forgetfulness, Godolphin sighed for the time he had fixed on for leaving
+the scenes in which it was pursued.  Of Constance's present existence he
+heard nothing; of her former triumphs and conquests he heard everywhere.
+And when did he ever meet one face, however fair, which could awaken a
+single thought of admiration? while hers was yet all faithfully glassed in
+his remembrance.  I know nothing that so utterly converts society into
+"the gallery of pictures," as the recollection of one loved and lost.
+That recollection has but two cures--Time and the hermitage.  Foreigners
+impute to us the turn for sentiment; alas! there are no people who have it
+less.  We seek for ever after amusement; and there is not one popular
+prose-book in our language in which the more tender and yearning secrets
+of the heart form the subject-matter.  The Corinne and the Julie weary us,
+or we turn them into sorry jests!
+
+One evening, a little before his departure from England--that a lingering
+and vague hope, of which Constance was the object, had considerably
+protracted beyond the allotted time--Godolphin was at a house in which the
+hostess was a relation to Lord Erpingham.
+
+"Have you heard," asked Lady G----, "that my cousin Erpingham is to be
+married?"
+
+"No, indeed; to whom?" said Godolphin, eagerly.  "To Miss Vernon."
+
+Sudden as was the shock, Godolphin heard, and changed neither hue nor
+muscle.
+
+"Are you certain of this?" asked a lady present.
+
+"Quite: Lady Erpingham is my authority; I received the news from herself
+this very day."
+
+"And does she seem pleased with the match?"
+
+"Why, I can scarcely say, for the letter contradicts itself in every
+passage.  Now, she congratulates herself on having so charming a
+daughter-in-law; now, she suddenly stops short to observe what a pity it
+is that young men should be so precipitate!  Now, she says what a great
+match it will be for her dear ward! and now, what a happy one it will be
+for Erpingham!  In short, she does not know whether to be pleased or
+vexed; and that, pour dire vrai, is my case also."
+
+"Why, indeed," observed the former speaker, "Miss Vernon has played her
+cards well.  Lord Erpingham would have been a great match in himself, with
+his person and reputation.  Ah! she was always an ambitious girl."
+
+"And a proud one," said Lady G----.  "Well, I suppose Erpingham House will
+be the rendezvous to all the blues, and wits, and savans.  Miss Vernon is
+another Aspasia, I hear."
+
+"I hate girls who are so designing," said the lady who spoke before, and
+had only one daughter, very ugly, who, at the age of thirty-five, was
+about to accept her first offer, and marry a younger son in the Guards.
+"I think she's rather vulgar; for my part, I doubt if--I shall patronise
+her."
+
+"Well, what do _you_ think of it, Mr. Godolphin?--you have seen Miss
+Vernon?"
+
+Godolphin was gone.
+
+It was about ten days after this conversation that Godolphin, waiting at a
+hotel in Dover the hour at which the packet set sail for Calais, took up
+the Morning Post; and the first passage that met his eye was the one
+which I transcribe:--
+
+"Marriage in High Life.--On Thursday last, at Wendover Castle, the Earl of
+Erpingham, to Constance, only daughter of the celebrated Mr. Vernon.  The
+bride was dressed, &c., ----"  And then followed the trite, yet pompous
+pageantry of words--the sounding nothings--with which ladies who become
+countesses are knelled into marriage.
+
+"The dream is over!" said Godolphin mournfully, as the paper fell to the
+ground; and, burying his face within his hands, he remained motionless
+till they came to announce the moment of departure.
+
+And thus Percy Godolphin left, for the second time, his native shores.
+When we return to him, what changes will the feelings now awakened within
+him, have worked in his character!  The drops that trickle within the
+cavern harden, yet brighten into spars as they indurate.  Nothing is more
+polished, nothing more cold, than that wisdom which is the work of former
+tears, of former passions, and is formed within a musing and solitary
+mind!
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GODOLPHIN, BY LYTTON, V2 ***
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