Edward Douglas was indeed a perfect model of youthful beauty, and possessed of all the high spirits and happy insouciance which can only charm at that early period.  He loved his profession, and had already distinguished himself in it.  He was handsome, brave, good-hearted, and good-humoured, but he was not clever; and Mary felt some solicitude as to the permanency of of Lady Emily’s attachment to him.  But Lady Emily, quick-sighted to the defects of the whole world, seemed happily blind to those of her lover; and when even Mary’s spirits were almost exhausted by his noisy rattle, Lady Emily, charmed and exhilarated, entered into all his practical jokes and boyish frolics with the greatest delight.

She soon perceived what was passing in Mary’s mind.

“I see perfectly well what you think of my penchant for Edward,” said she one day; “I can tell you exactly what was passing in your thoughts just now.  You were thinking how strange, how passing strange it is, that I, who am (false modesty avaunt!) certainly cleverer than Edward, should yet be so partial to him, and that my lynx eyes should have failed to discover in him faults which, with a single glance, I should have detected in others.  Now, can’t you guess what renders even these very faults so attractive to me?”

“The old story, I suppose?” said Mary.  “Love.”

“Not at all.  Love might blind me to his faults altogether, and then my case would be indeed hopeless, were I living in the belief that I was loving a piece of perfection—­a sort of Apollo Belvidere in mind as well as in person.  Now, so far from that, I could reckon you up a whole catalogue of his faults; and nevertheless, I love him with my whole heart, faults and all.  In the first place, they are the faults with which I have been familiar from infancy; and therefore they possess a charm (to my shame be it said!) greater than other people’s virtues would have to me.  They come over my fancy like some snatch of an old nursery song, which one loves to hear in defiance of taste and reason, merely because it is something that carries us back to those days which, whatever they were in reality, always look bright and sunny in retrospection.  In the second place, his faults are real, genuine, natural faults; and in this age of affectation how refreshing it is to meet with even a natural fault!  I grant you, Edward talks absurdly, and asks questions a faire dresser les cheveux of a Mrs. Bluemits.  But that amuses me; for his ignorance is not the ignorance of vulgarity or stupidity, but the ignorance of a light head and a merry heart—­of one, in short, whose understanding has been at sea when other people’s were at school.  His bonmots certainly would not do to be printed; but then they make me laugh a great deal more than if they were better, for he is always naif and original, and I prefer an in indifferent original any day to a good copy.  How it shocks me to hear people recommending to their children to copy such a person’s manners!  A copied manner, how insupportable!  The servile imitator of a set pattern, how despicable!  No!  I would rather have Edward in all the freshness of his own faults rather than in the faded semblance of another persons’s proprieties.”