his first season in
town, and as he had a great melting blue eye, the figure of an Adonis,
and a white and shapely hand for a ring, he was well equipped for
conquest. He had darted many an inflaming glance at Mistress Clorinda
before the first meats were removed. Even in London he had heard a vague
rumour of this handsome young woman, bred among her father's dogs,
horses, and boon companions, and ripening into a beauty likely to make
town faces pale. He had almost fallen into the spleen on hearing that
she had left her boy's clothes and vowed she would wear them no more, as
above all things he had desired to see how she carried them and what
charms they revealed. On hearing from his host and kinsman that she had
said that on her birth-night she would bid them farewell for ever by
donning them for the last time, he was consumed with eagerness to obtain
an invitation. This his kinsman besought for him, and, behold! the first
glance the beauty shot at him pierced his inflammable bosom like a dart.
Never before had it been his fortune to behold female charms so dazzling
and eyes of such lustre and young majesty. The lovely baggage had a
saucy way of standing with her white jewelled hands in her pockets like a
pretty fop, and throwing up her little head like a modish beauty who was
of royal blood; and these two tricks alone, he felt, might have set on
fire the heart of a man years older and colder than himself.

If she had been of the order of soft-natured charmers, they would have
fallen into each other's eyes before the wine was changed; but this
Mistress Clorinda was not. She did not fear to meet the full battery of
his enamoured glances, but she did not choose to return them. She played
her part of the pretty young fellow who was a high-spirited beauty, with
more of wit and fire than she had ever played it before. The rollicking
hunting-squires, who had been her play-fellows so long, devoured her with
their delighted glances and roared with laughter at her sallies. Their
jokes and flatteries were not of the most seemly, but she had not been
bred to seemliness and modesty, and was no more ignorant than if she had
been, in sooth, some gay young springald of a lad. To her it was part of
the entertainment that upon this last night they conducted themselves as
beseemed her boyish masquerading. Though country-bred, she had lived
among companions who were men of the world and lived without restraints,
and she had so