riage was with her a sine qua non, and had dismissed,
with the loudest scorn and indignation, all propositions of a less
proper nature.

Poor Thomas Bullock was another of her admirers, and had offered to
marry her; but three shillings a week and a puddn was not to the girl's
taste, and Thomas had been scornfully rejected. Hayes had also made her
a direct proposal. Catherine did not say no: she was too prudent: but
she was young and could wait; she did not care for Mr. Hayes yet enough
to marry him--(it did not seem, indeed, in the young woman's nature to
care for anybody)--and she gave her adorer flatteringly to understand
that, if nobody better appeared in the course of a few years, she might
be induced to become Mrs. Hayes. It was a dismal prospect for the
poor fellow to live upon the hope of being one day Mrs. Catherine's
pis-aller.

In the meantime she considered herself free as the wind, and permitted
herself all the innocent gaieties which that "chartered libertine," a
coquette, can take. She flirted with all the bachelors, widowers, and
married men, in a manner which did extraordinary credit to her years:
and let not the reader fancy such pastimes unnatural at her early age.
The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from
babyhood upwards. Little SHE'S of three years old play little airs and
graces upon small heroes of five; simpering misses of nine make attacks
upon young gentlemen of twelve; and at sixteen, a well-grown girl, under
encouraging circumstances--say, she is pretty, in a family of ugly elder
sisters, or an only child and heiress, or a humble wench at a country
inn, like our fair Catherine--is at the very pink and prime of her
coquetry: they will jilt you at that age with an ease and arch infantine
simplicity that never can be surpassed in maturer years.

Miss Catherine, then, was a franche coquette, and Mr. John Hayes was
miserable. His life was passed in a storm of mean passions and bitter
jealousies, and desperate attacks upon the indifference-rock of Mrs.
Catherine's heart, which not all his tempest of love could beat down. O
cruel cruel pangs of love unrequited! Mean rogues feel them as well as
great heroes. Lives there the man in Europe who has not felt them many
times?--who has not knelt, and fawned, and supplicated, and wept, and
cursed, and raved, all in vain; and passed long wakeful nights with
ghosts of dead hopes for company; shadows of buried remembrances that