hich, with her spirited piano playing, and above
all, her skill in painting, caused her to be regarded as a social
wonder, and to be held up as a pattern to many a young girl who came
out after her in society.

Before she was sixteen, she had refused many offers of marriage, and
she smiled when she heard of the betrothal of one and another, for she
could say, You could have married this man, if you had wished to. Her
mother would have been glad to have her married young, but her father
was not willing that his child should be separated from him so early;
he hoped that some prince of the collateral branch would unite himself
with her in marriage.

Her seventeenth birthday was ushered in by a morning serenade from the
band of the Guards, and congratulations poured in from all sides; but
if she could have been seen then, as the tones of the music awakened
her from sleep, and a new thought stirred within her, her large eyes
would have presented a look different from any ever seen in them
before. The thought was, I have no belief in love. All this singing and
talking of the power of love is nonsensical romance! Her mother's
teaching had contributed not a little to produce this conviction; she
had early uprooted the influences of love, perpetually representing to
her daughter that the main thing was, to make a brilliant match; and
Bella, in fact, had never loved any one, for she insisted upon the
submission of him towards whom she felt any preference. From one of her
mother's cousins she heard suggestions of an opposite nature; she
frequently said, half satirically and half seriously, that the only
right love was that directed towards a man of a lower condition. If you
should love the artist in whose studio you work, or your teacher of
music or of language, that would be genuine love. But it seemed to
Bella as if any special attachment to a teacher was like entertaining a
love for a livery-servant, or even for a being of a different species,
and choosing him for a husband.

On that seventeenth birthday, there was perceptible, for the first
time, that cold, glassy, Medusa-look, which regarded men with
indifference, as if they were nothing but shadows; but no one remarked
it, and it seemed as if on that day something was paralyzed within her
which would never again feel the stirrings of life.

Before she was twenty, after the year of mourning for her father had
elapsed, with feelings already cold and benumbed, Bella withdre