probably destined under Petrea's hand never to be brought forth
from chaos. Petrea had an especially great inclination for great
undertakings, and the misfortune to fail in them. This want of success
always wounded her deeply, but in the next moment the impulse of an
irresistibly vigorous temperament raised her above misfortune in some
new attempt. The blood rushed up to her young head, and filled it with a
mass of half-formed thoughts, fancies, and ideas; her mind and her
character were full of disquiet. At times joyous and wild beyond bounds,
she became on the other hand wretched and dispirited without reason.
Poor Petrea! She was wanting in every kind of self-regulation and
ballast, even outwardly; she walked ill--she stood ill--she curtseyed
ill--sate ill--and dressed ill; and occasioned, in consequence, much
pain to her mother, who felt so acutely whatever was unpleasing; and
this also was very painful to Petrea, who had a warm heart, and who
worshipped her mother.

Petrea also cherished the warmest affection and admiration for Sara, but
her manner even of evidencing her affection was commonly so entirely
without tact, as rather to displease than please the object of it. The
consciousness of this fact embittered much of Petrea's life; but it
conducted her by degrees to a love in which tact and address are of no
consequence, and which is never unreturned.

Sometimes Petrea was seized with a strong consciousness of the
chaoticness of her state; but then, again, at other times she would have
a presentiment that all this would clear itself away, and then that
something which was quite out of the common way would come forth; and
then she was accustomed to say, half in jest and half in earnest, to her
sisters, "You'll see what I shall turn out sometime!" But in what this
extraordinary turning out should consist nobody knew, and least of all
poor Petrea herself. She glanced full of desire towards many suns, and
was first attracted by one and then by another.

Louise had for Petrea's prophesyings great contempt, but the little
Gabriele believed in them all. She delighted herself, moreover, so
heartily in all that her sister began, that Petrea sacrificed to her her
most beautiful gold-paper temple; her original picture of shepherdesses
and altars; and her island of bliss in the middle of peaceful waters,
and in the bay of which lay a little fleet of nut-shells, with rigging
of silk, and laden with sugar-work, and from the