At length a crisis was brought on by the attempt of the boldest of her admirers to kiss her.  She repelled him passionately, facing him with gleaming eyes, and lips white with anger and disgust.  He was surprised, at first—­then angry; but she spoke to him in a way that cowed, and finally almost made him ashamed of himself.  He even went so far, afterward, as to try to knock a fellow down for speaking disrespectfully of “Neelie.”  For her own part, she locked herself into her room, and cried tempestuously for half an hour; then she spent a still longer time in lying with her heated face upon the pillow, reviewing the incidents of her life since Bressant had entered into it.  He was the superior of any man she had met before or since:  she was sure of it now; it could no longer be called the infatuation of inexperience.  She took herself well to task for the recent laxity and imprudence of her conduct; did not spare to cut where the flesh was tender; and resolved never again to lay herself open to blame.

This was very well, but the mood was too strained and exalted to be depended upon.  Cornelia got up from the disordered bed, put it to rights again, washed her stained face carefully, rearranged her hair, and went down-stairs.  All that afternoon she was cold, grave, and reserved; inquiries after her health met with a chilling answer, and her friends wisely concluded to leave her malady, whatever it were, to the cure of time.  As dinner progressed, Cornelia began to thaw:  when Mr. Grumblow, the member of Congress, requested her, with solemn and oppressive courtesy, to do him the honor of taking a glass of wine with him, she responded graciously; and as the toasts circulated, she first looked upon her ideal resolves with good-humored tolerance, and then they escaped her memory altogether.  She became once more lively and sparkling, and carried on what she imagined was a very brilliant conversation with two or three people at once.  By the time she was ready to retire, she had practised anew the whole list of her lately-abrogated accomplishments; and she wound up by picking the French novel out of the corner into which she had disdainfully thrown it twelve hours before, reading it in bed until she fell asleep, and dreaming that she was its heroine.  And yet she had not forgotten to wind up Bressant’s watch, and put it in its usual place under her pillow.

It might seem strange that his memory should not have kept her beyond the reach of deleterious influences.  But a young girl’s love is any thing but a preservative, if it shall yield her, in any aspect, other than such pure and delicate thoughts as she would not scruple to whisper in her mother’s ear, or to ask God’s blessing on at night.  Should there be any circumstance or incident, however seemingly trifling and unimportant, in her reminiscences, which nevertheless keeps recurring to the mind with a slight twinge of regret—­a feeling that it would have been just as well had it