had ever met; and her
manner of singing the Chants delighted him--but after a while he began
to grow rather tired of Miss Amory, her ways and graces grew stale
somehow; then he was doubtful about Miss Amory; then she made a
disturbance in his school, lost her temper, and rapped the children's
fingers. Blanche inspired this admiration and satiety, somehow, in many
men. She tried to please them, and flung out all her graces at
once; came down to them with all her jewels on, all her smiles, and
cajoleries, and coaxings, and ogles. Then she grew tired of them and of
trying to please them, and never having cared about them, dropped them:
and the men grew tired of her, and dropped her too. It was a happy night
for Belinda when Blanche went away; and her husband, with rather a
blush and a sigh, said "he had been deceived in her; he had thought her
endowed with many precious gifts, he feared they were mere tinsel; he
thought she had been a right-thinking person, he feared she had merely
made religion an amusement--she certainly had quite lost her temper to
the schoolmistress, and beat Polly Rucker's knuckles cruelly." Belinda
flew to his arms, there was no question about the grave or the veil
any more. He tenderly embraced her on the forehead. "There is none like
thee, my Belinda," he said, throwing his fine eyes up to the ceiling,
"precious among women!" As for Blanche, from the instant she lost sight
of him and Belinda, she never thought or cared about either any more.

But when Arthur went down to pass a few days at Tunbridge Wells with the
Begum, this stage of indifference had not arrived on Miss Blanche's part
or on that of the simple clergyman. Smirke believed her to be an angel
and wonder of a woman. Such a perfection he had never seen, and sate
listening to her music in the summer evenings, open-mouthed, rapt in
wonder, tea-less, and bread-and-butter-less. Fascinating as he had
heard the music of the opera to be--he had never but once attended
an exhibition of that nature (which he mentioned with a blush and a
sigh--it was on that day when he had accompanied Helen and her son to
the play at Chatteris)--he could not conceive anything more delicious,
more celestial, he had almost said, than Miss Amory's music. She was a
most gifted being: she had a precious soul: she had the most remarkable
talents--to all outward seeming, the most heavenly disposition, etc.
etc. It was in this way that, being then at the height of his own