rary fame, and bachelor's chambers, and a chop-house, and the
rest of it."

She knew, and thinking differently in the matter of literary fame, she
flushed, and, ashamed of the flush, frowned.

He bent over to her with the perusing earnestness of a gentleman about
to trifle.

"You cannot intend that frown?"

"Did I frown?"

"You do."

"Now?"

"Fiercely."

"Oh!"

"Will you smile to reassure me?"

"Willingly, as well as I can."

A gloom overcame him. With no woman on earth did he shine so as to
recall to himself seigneur and dame of the old French Court as he did
with Laetitia Dale. He did not wish the period revived, but reserved it
as a garden to stray into when he was in the mood for displaying
elegance and brightness in the society of a lady; and in speech
Laetitia helped him to the nice delusion. She was not devoid of grace
of bearing either.

Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his ascendency?
Hitherto she had, and for years, and quite fresh. But how of her as a
married woman? Our souls are hideously subject to the conditions of our
animal nature! A wife, possibly mother, it was within sober calculation
that there would be great changes in her. And the hint of any change
appeared a total change to one of the lofty order who, when they are
called on to relinquish possession instead of aspiring to it, say, All
or nothing!

Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie effecting the
slightest alteration of her character or habit of mind, wherefore press
it upon a tolerably hardened spinster!

Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon's for the dance, he
remembered acutely that the injury then done by his generosity to his
tender sensitiveness had sickened and tarnished the effulgence of two
or three successive anniversaries of his coming of age. Nor had he
altogether yet got over the passion of greed for the whole group of the
well-favoured of the fair sex, which in his early youth had made it
bitter for him to submit to the fickleness, not to say the modest
fickleness, of any handsome one of them in yielding her hand to a man
and suffering herself to be led away. Ladies whom he had only heard of
as ladies of some beauty incurred his wrath for having lovers or taking
husbands. He was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in
covetousness;--for well he knew that even under Moslem law he could not
have them all--but as the enamoured custodian of the sex's purity,
that blus