comprehend
it; she had never looked up to man or woman with anything like
reverence; she saw too quickly and too keenly into the foibles of all
who came near her to care to look farther for their virtues. If she had
ever been humbled, and thence taught to look up, she might by this time
have been a grand woman, worthy of a great man's worship. She patronized
Miss St. John, considerably to her amusement, and nothing to her
indignation. Of course she could not understand her. She had a vague
notion of how she spent her time; and believing a certain amount of
fanaticism essential to religion, wondered how so sensible and ladylike
a person as Miss St. John could go in for it.

Meeting Falconer at Lady Janet's, she was taken with him. Possibly she
recognized in him a strength that would have made him her master, if he
had cared for such a distinction; but nothing she could say attracted
more than a passing attention on his part. Falconer was out of her
sphere, and her influences were powerless to reach him.

At length she began to have a glimmering of the relation of labour
between Miss St. John and him, and applied to the former for some
enlightenment. But Miss St. John was far from explicit, for she had no
desire for such assistance as Lady Georgina's. What motives next led her
to seek the interview I am now about to record, I cannot satisfactorily
explain, but I will hazard a conjecture or two, although I doubt if she
understood them thoroughly herself.

She was, if not blasee, at least ennuyee, and began to miss excitement,
and feel blindly about her for something to make life interesting. She
was gifted with far more capacity than had ever been exercised, and was
of a large enough nature to have grown sooner weary of trifles than most
women of her class. She might have been an artist, but she drew like a
young lady; she might have been a prophetess, and Byron was her greatest
poet. It is no wonder that she wanted something she had not got.

Since she had been foiled in her attempt on Miss St. John, which she
attributed to jealousy, she had, in quite another circle, heard strange,
wonderful, even romantic stories about Falconer and his doings among the
poor. A new world seemed to open before her longing gaze--a world, or a
calenture, a mirage? for would she cross the 'wandering fields of barren
foam,' to reach the green grass that did wave on the far shore? the
dewless desert to reach the fair water that did lie leag