a dream, and we do not speak of our dreams--not of
every dream. Especially do we reserve our speech concerning the dream in
which we had a revelation of the proud frame deprived of a guiding will,
flung rudderless on the waves. Ah that abject! The dismantled ship has
the grandeur of the tempest about it, but the soul swayed by passion is
ignominiously bare-poled, detected, hooted by its old assumption. If
instinct plays fantastical tricks when we are sleeping, let it be ever
behind a curtain. We can be held guilty only if we court exposure. The
ideal of English gentleman and gentlewoman is closely Roman in the
self-repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally
difficult to them shows an affinity with the type. Do you perchance, O
continental observers of the race, call it hypocritical? It is their
nature disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation. Socially these
island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army,
and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of the flag.

Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.
They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to
examine. But they were not so successful with the lady governing the
household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman of
decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army aforesaid.
To her they were without a mask; John was passion's slave, Jane the most
romantic of Eve's daughters. She pointed to incidents of their youth; her
vision was acutely retrospective. The wealth of her nephew and niece
caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past
endurance. She had grounds for fearing that John, who might step to an
alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom, would marry
a beggar-maid. As for Jane, she was the natural prey of a threadbare
poet. Mrs. Lackstraw heard of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell, and demanded the
right to inspect him. She doubted such perfect disinterestedness in any
young man as that he should slave at account-keeping to that Laundry
without a prospect of rich remuneration, and the tale of his going down
to the city for a couple of hours each day to learn the art of keeping
books was of very dubious import in a cousin of Captain Con O'Donnell.
'Let me see your prodigy,' she said, with the emphasis on each word.
Patrick was presented at her table. She had steeled herself against an
Irish tongue.