f
the servants of the Muse in this land of social policy avoid scenes of
an inordinate wantonness, which detract from the dignity of our leaders
and menace human nature with confusion. Sagacious are they who conduct
the individual on broad lines, over familiar tracks, under well-known
characteristics. What men will do, and amorously minded men will do,
is less the question than what it is politic they should be shown to
do.

The night wore through. Laetitia was bent, but had not yielded. She
had been obliged to say--and how many times she could not bear to
recollect: "I do not love you; I have no love to give"; and issuing
from such a night to look again upon the face of day, she scarcely felt
that she was alive.

The contest was renewed by her father with the singing of the birds.
Mr. Dale then produced the first serious impression she had received.
He spoke of their circumstances, of his being taken from her and
leaving her to poverty, in weak health; of the injury done to her
health by writing for bread; and of the oppressive weight he would be
relieved of by her consenting.

He no longer implored her; he put the case on common ground.

And he wound up: "Pray do not be ruthless, my girl."

The practical statement, and this adjuration incongruously to conclude
it, harmonized with her disordered understanding, her loss of all
sentiment and her desire to be kind. She sighed to herself. "Happily,
it is over!"

Her father was too weak to rise. He fell asleep. She was bound down to
the house for hours; and she walked through her suite, here at the
doors, there at the windows, thinking of Clara's remark "of a century
passing". She had not wished it, but a light had come on her to show
her what she would have supposed a century could not have effected: she
saw the impossible of overnight a possible thing: not desireable, yet
possible, wearing the features of the possible. Happily, she had
resisted too firmly to be again besought.

Those features of the possible once beheld allured the mind to
reconsider them. Wealth gives us the power to do good on earth. Wealth
enables us to see the world, the beautiful scenes of the earth.
Laetitia had long thirsted both for a dowering money-bag at her girdle,
and the wings to fly abroad over lands which had begun to seem fabulous
in her starved imagination. Then, moreover, if her sentiment for this
gentleman was gone, it was only a delusion gone; accurate sight and
knowledge of