Thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of selection.

And then did the best man of a host blow his triumphant horn, and loudly.

He looked the fittest; he justified the dictum of Science.  The survival of the Patternes was assured.  “I would,” he said to his admirer, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, “have bargained for health above everything, but she has everything besides—­lineage, beauty, breeding:  is what they call an heiress, and is the most accomplished of her sex.”  With a delicate art he conveyed to the lady’s understanding that Miss Middleton had been snatched from a crowd, without a breath of the crowd having offended his niceness.  He did it through sarcasm at your modern young women, who run about the world nibbling and nibbled at, until they know one sex as well as the other, and are not a whit less cognizant of the market than men; pure, possibly; it is not so easy to say innocent; decidedly not our feminine ideal.  Miss Middleton was different:  she was the true ideal, fresh-gathered morning fruit in a basket, warranted by her bloom.

Women do not defend their younger sisters for doing what they perhaps have done—­lifting a veil to be seen, and peeping at a world where innocence is as poor a guarantee as a babe’s caul against shipwreck.  Women of the world never think of attacking the sensual stipulation for perfect bloom, silver purity, which is redolent of the Oriental origin of the love-passion of their lords.  Mrs. Mountstuart congratulated Sir Willoughby on the prize he had won in the fair western-eastern.

“Let me see her,” she said; and Miss Middleton was introduced and critically observed.

She had the mouth that smiles in repose.  The lips met full on the centre of the bow and thinned along to a lifting dimple; the eyelids also lifted slightly at the outer corners, and seemed, like the lip into the limpid cheek, quickening up the temples, as with a run of light, or the ascension indicated off a shoot of colour.  Her features were playfellows of one another, none of them pretending to rigid correctness, nor the nose to the ordinary dignity of governess among merry girls, despite which the nose was of a fair design, not acutely interrogative or inviting to gambols.  Aspens imaged in water, waiting for the breeze, would offer a susceptible lover some suggestion of her face:  a pure, smooth-white face, tenderly flushed in the cheeks, where the gentle dints, were faintly intermelting even during quietness.  Her eyes were brown, set well between mild lids, often shadowed, not unwakeful.  Her hair of lighter brown, swelling above her temples on the sweep to the knot, imposed the triangle of the fabulous wild woodland visage from brow to mouth and chin, evidently in agreement with her taste; and the triangle suited her; but her face was not significant of a tameless wildness or of weakness; her equable shut mouth threw its long curve to guard the small round chin from that effect; her eyes wavered only