its reckless sacrifice in his daughter's honor appeared the only
adequate expression of his love. The intervals of his devotion were
passed in idle boasting, and to me he detailed every incident. There was
something really touching in the abject way in which he mentioned each
trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily
life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare
animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted every idea of
responsibility. He looked upon her as a superior being, and her
adornment as a sacred duty. The richness of her toilet, the magnificence
of her equipage, the glory of her beauty, became an inexhaustible
surprise and delight. The utter lack of congeniality, the barrier of
caste that divided them, was indescribably sad. Rapturous admiration,
gentle amazement, blind idolatry, meek bewilderment, the one twisted by
brutality to a living distortion, the other lifted by refinement to the
embodiment of womanly grace; and yet they were father and daughter. To
do her justice, she strove in every way to testify her love and
gratitude for her strange parent; the ties of blood asserted themselves
in her words and caresses, but they looked doubtfully out of her eyes.
Educated far away from him, and amid other associations, she could not
be blind to his faults and shortcomings. The social gulf that divided
them, though bridged by her sense of duty, was ever present in her
thoughts. I mourned over the remorseless avarice that made him what he
was; I almost regretted the culture that placed her so far above him;
but, knowing the rude shocks to her sensitive nature, the ruthless
trampling on every womanly instinct, I mourned for her the most.

Alas for the schemes of prosy men and women! when tender Loveliness
goes airing herself through shady lanes, frank young Valor is seldom far
off. The Eurydice may be only a school-girl, and Orpheus a brave, manly
boy in a blue coat; but there is a world of heart-fluttering, for all
that. The flush of conscious beauty blooming on the cheek of one, is
generally a shadow of the warm red that mantles the face of the other.
While Eurydice Gripstone mused in quiet nooks, it was no fabled youth of
magic lyre who sent the rhetoric and botany waltzing through her brain;
and when the fierce cry of "Lights out!" hurried _Jane Eyre_ under the
pillow, it was no dream of impossible mustaches that made her hear the
clocks chime dismally a