ll coldness another, as some report had reached
them accusing their hearts of feeling too deeply her attractions, or,
as they themselves suspected, for the first time, that a heart was not
a word for a poetical nothing, and that to look on so beautiful and
glorious a creature was sufficient to convince them, even yet, of the
possibility of emotion. She had felt to the quick the condescending
patronage of duchesses and chaperons; the oblique hint; the nice and
fine distinction which, in polished circles, divides each grade from
the other, and allows you to be galled without the pleasure of feeling
justified in offence.

All this, which, in the flush and heyday of youth, and gaiety, and
loveliness, would have been unnoticed by other women, rankled deep
in the mind of Constance Vernon. The image of her dying father, his
complaints, his accusations (the justice of which she never for an
instant questioned), rose up before her in the brightest hours of the
dance and the revel. She was not one of those women whose meek and
gentle nature would fly what wounds them: Constance had resolved
to conquer. Despising glitter and gaiety, and show, she burned, she
thirsted for power--a power which could retaliate the insults she
fancied she had received, and should turn condescension into homage.
This object, which every casual word, every heedless glance from
another, fixed deeper and deeper in her heart, took a sort of sanctity
from the associations with which she linked it--her father's memory and
his dying breath.

At this moment in which we have portrayed her, all these restless, and
sore, and haughty feelings were busy within; but they were combated,
even while the more fiercely aroused, by one soft and tender
thought--the image of Godolphin--of Godolphin, the spendthrift heir of
a broken fortune and a fallen house. She felt too deeply that she loved
him; and, ignorant of his worldlier qualities, imagined that he loved
her with all the devotion of that romance, and the ardour of that
genius, which appeared to her to compose his character. But this
persuasion gave her now no delightful emotion. Convinced that she ought
to reject him, his image only coloured with sadness those objects and
that ambition which she had hitherto regarded with an exulting pride.
She was not less bent on the lofty ends of her destiny; but the glory
and the illusion had fallen from them. She had taken an insight into
futurity, and felt, that to enjoy pow