itle, who had the intoxicating attractions of the
ruddy orchard apple on the tree next the roadside wall, when the owner is
absent, was bold in Mr. Beamish, passing temerity; nor would even he have
attempted it had he not been assured of the support of his phalanx of
great ladies. They indeed, after being taken into the secret, had
stipulated that first they must have an inspection of the transformed
dairymaid; and the review was not unfavourable. Duchess Susan came out of
it more scatheless than her duke. She was tongue-tied, and her tutored
walking and really admirable stature helped her to appease, the critics
of her sex; by whom her too readily blushful innocence was praised, with
a reserve, expressed in the remark, that she was a monstrous fine toy for
a duke's second childhood, and should never have been let fly from his
nursery. Her milliner was approved. The duke was a notorious connoisseur
of female charms, and would see, of course, to the decorous adornment of
her person by the best of modistes. Her smiling was pretty, her eyes were
soft; she might turn out good, if well guarded for a time; but these
merits of the woman are not those of the great lady, and her title was
too strong a beam on her character to give it a fair chance with her
critics. They one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks.
That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by no other means, they
declared. Her blushing was indecent.

Truly the critics of the foeman sex behaved in a way to cause the blushes
to swarm rosy as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her
sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they flutter like her
loosened zone, and breast the air thick as flower petals on the summer's
breath, weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might protest her
inability to keep her blushes down; that the wrong was done by the
insolent eyes, and not by her artless cheeks. Ay, but nature, if we are
to tame these men, must be swathed and concealed, partly stifled,
absolutely stifled upon occasion. The natural woman does not move a foot
without striking earth to conjure up the horrid apparition of the natural
man, who is not as she, but a cannibal savage. To be the light which
leads, it is her business to don the misty vesture of an idea, that she
may dwell as an idea in men's minds, very dim, very powerful, but
abstruse, unseizable. Much wisdom was imparted to her on the subject, and
she understood a little, and