m, and so did not try to hit her apprehension,
much less to raise or cultivate her intellect. He had lived too long at
the South.

Her moral nature was very oddly developed, showing how starved and
stunted some of the faculties, naturally good, become without their
proper nourishment. As, intellectually, she seemed not to comprehend
herself, except that she had a vague sense of want and waste, so, from
the habit of occupying herself with the external, she had not only a
keen sense of the beautiful in outward form, but as ready a perception
of character as could consist with a want of tact. Adaptation she
certainly had. Tact she could not have, since her sympathies were so
limited and her habit so much of external perception and appreciation.
All this desolate tract in her nature might yet possibly be cultivated.
But thus far it had never been. Beyond a small circle of thoughts and
feelings, she was incapable of being interested. She didn't say, "Anan!"
but she looked it.

There was the same want of comprehension, I may call it, in reference to
propriety of conduct. A certain nobleness, and freedom from all that was
petty and cold, kept her from coquetry. At the same time she had a
womanish vanity about her admirers, and entire freedom in speaking of
them. In vain I endeavored to insinuate the unpleasant truth, that the
fervency of her adorers was no compliment to her. She could not
understand that she ought to shrink from the implied imputation of such
manifestations.

Somewhat out of patience, one day, at her pleasure in receiving a
bouquet of rare flowers from one of these adorers, I said,--

"Isn't this the person who you said professed an attachment to you, or
rather sent heliotrope to you and told you it meant _je vous aime?_"

"The very man!" said she, smiling.

"Then I am sure you are, as I should be, sadly mortified at his
continuing these attentions."

"I don't see why I should be mortified," said she, "He may be, if he
likes."

"You know what the poet says, Lulu, and it is excellent sense,--

'In part she is to blame that has been tried,
He comes too near that comes to be denied.'"

The crimson tide rippled over her forehead at this, but it was only a
passing disturbance, and she answered sweetly,--

"I don't think you are quite fair," as if she had been playing at some
game with me.

Apparently, too, she had as little religious as moral sense, though she
called herself a member of the