But this was not so easy.  Things she would willingly have forgotten seemed, for that very reason, to stick in her memory—­nay, in some moods of mind, to appear less entirely objectionable than in others.  She had little opportunity for solitude—­to bethink herself where she stood, and how she came there.  During the daytime, there were the young ladies, here, there, and everywhere; there could be no seclusion.  In the afternoons and evenings some admiring, soft-voiced young gentleman was always at her side, offering her his arm on the faintest pretext, or attempting to put it round her waist on no pretext at all; who always found it more convenient to murmur in her ear, than to speak out from a reasonable distance; whose hands were always getting into proximity with hers, and often attempting to clasp them; whose eyes were forever expressing something earnest or arch, pleading or romantic—­though precisely what, his lingering utterance scarcely tried to define; who never could “see the harm” of these and many other peculiarities of behavior; and, indeed it was not very easy to argue about them, although the young gentlemen never shrank from the dispute, and never failed to have on hand an inexhaustible assortment of syllogisms to combat any remonstrance that might be advanced withal; while at the worst they could always be surprised and hurt if their conduct were called into question.  Well, they appeared to be refined and high-bred.  Compare them with Bill Reynolds!  And the flattery of their attention, and the preference they gave her over the other girls, were not entirely lost upon Cornelia.

In the absence of both gentlemen and ladies, there, on an easily-accessible shelf in the library, were those works of Dumas, Feval, and the rest, to which Cornelia’s attention had been indirectly invited.  She had a sound knowledge of the French language, and an ardent love of fiction, and beyond question the books were of absorbing interest.

At first, indeed, Cornelia, as she read, would ever and anon blush, and look around apprehensively, for fear there should be an observer somewhere; and this, too, at passages which a week before she would have passed over without noticing, because not understanding them.  If any one appeared, she hid the book away in the folds of her dress, or under the sofa-cushion, and put on the air of having just awakened from a nap.  By-and-by, however, when she had become a little used to the tone of the works, and had asked herself, what were the books put there for, unless to be read, she plucked up courage, as her young friends would have said—­albeit angels might have wept at it—­and overcame her notions so far as to be able to take down from its shelf and become deeply interested in one of the Frenchiest of the set, while three or four people were sitting in the library!

A triumph that!  Howbeit, when she went to bed that night there was a persistent pain of dry unhappiness in her heart, and a self-contemptuous feeling, which she tried to get the better of by calling it ennui.  But in time a kind of hardness, at once flexible and impenetrable, began to encase her, rendering her course more easy, less liable to embarrassment, more self-confident than before.