ry--she had never Been it; his opinions, his
tastes, how correct! they were her own; his form, his face, how
agreeable!--her eyes had seen it, and her heart acknowledged it; besides,
his eyes confessed the power of her own charms; he was brave, for he was a
soldier;--in short, as Emily had predicted, he was a hero--for he was
Colonel Egerton.

Had Jane been possessed of less exuberance of fancy, she might have been a
little at a loss to identify all these good properties with her hero: or
had she possessed a matured or well-regulated judgment to control that
fancy, they might possibly have assumed a different appearance. No
explanation had taken place between-them, however. Jane knew, both by her
own feelings and by all the legends of love from its earliest days, that
the moment of parting was generally a crisis in affairs of the heart, and,
with a backwardness occasioned by her modesty, had rather avoided than
sought an opportunity to favor the colonel's wishes. Egerton had no been
over anxious to come to the point, and everything was left as heretofore:
neither, however, appeared to doubt in the least the state of the other's'
affections; and there might be said to exist between them one of those not
unusual engagements by implication which it would have been, in their own
estimation, a breach of faith to recede from, but which, like all other
bargains that are loosely made, are sometimes violated when convenient.
Man is a creature that, as experience has sufficiently proved, it is
necessary to keep in his proper place in society by wholesome
restrictions; and we have often thought it a matter of regret that some
well understood regulations did not exist by which it became not only
customary, but incumbent on him, to proceed in his road to the temple of
Hymen. We know that it is ungenerous, ignoble, almost unprecedented, to
doubt the faith, the constancy, of a male paragon; yet, somehow, as the
papers occasionally give us a sample of such infidelity; as we have
sometimes seen a solitary female brooding over her woes in silence, and,
with the seemliness of feminine decorum shrinking from the discovery of
its cause, or which the grave has revealed for the first time, we cannot
but wish that either the watchfulness of the parent, or a sense of
self-preservation in the daughter, would, for the want of a better, cause
them to adhere to those old conventional forms of courtship which require
a man to speak to be understood,