ning. Sybil was
in bounding spirits and not at all pleased to find that her companion
became moody and abstracted as they went on. "Poor Mr. Carrington!"
thought she to herself, "he is so nice; but when he puts on that solemn
air, one might as well go to sleep. I am quite certain no nice woman
will ever marry him if he looks like that;" and her practical mind ran
off among all the girls of her acquaintance, in search of one who would
put up with Carrington's melancholy face. She knew his devotion to her
sister, but had long ago rejected this as a hopeless chance. There was
a simplicity about Sybil's way of dealing with life, which had its
own charm. She never troubled herself about the impossible or the
unthinkable. She had feelings, and was rather quick in her sympathies
and sorrows, but she was equally quick in getting over them, and she
expected other people to do likewise. Madeleine dissected her own
feelings and was always wondering whether they were real or not; she
had a habit of taking off her mental clothing, as she might take off a
dress, and looking at it as though it belonged to some one else, and as
though sensations were manufactured like clothes. This seems to be one
of the easier ways of deadening sorrow, as though the mind could
teach itself to lop off its feelers. Sybil particularly disliked this
self-inspection. In the first place she did not understand it, and in
the second her mind was all feelers, and amputation was death. She could
no more analyse a feeling than doubt its existence, both which were
habits of her sister.

How was Sybil to know what was passing in Carrington's mind? He was
thinking of nothing in which she supposed herself interested. He was
troubled with memories of civil war and of associations still earlier,
belonging to an age already vanishing or vanished; but what could she
know about civil war who had been almost an infant at the time? At this
moment, she happened to be interested in the baffle of Waterloo, for she
was reading "Vanity Fair," and had cried as she ought for poor little
Emmy, when her husband, George Osborne, lay dead on the field there,
with a bullet through his heart. But how was she to know that here, only
a few rods before her, lay scores and hundreds of George Osbornes, or
his betters, and in their graves the love and hope of many Emmys, not
creatures of the imagination, but flesh and blood, like herself? To her,
there was no more in those associations which