elements have always, he says, a pretty, besides a thorough, style of doing it, when they get the better of us; and the one by reason of the other.  He instances the horse, the yacht, and chiefly the sword, for proof, that the handsomest is the most effective.  And he prints large:  ‘Ugly is only half way to A thing.’  To an invention, I suppose he intends to say.  But looking on our huge foundering sea-monsters and the disappearance of the unwieldy in Nature, and the countenances of criminals, who are, he bids us observe, always in the long run beaten, I seem to see a meaning our country might meditate on.

So, as I said, it was done; for Admiral Baldwin could refuse his Crinny nothing; as little as he would deny anything to himself, the heartiest of kindly hosts, fathers, friends.  Carinthia Jane’s grand good fortune covered that pit, the question of money, somehow, and was, we may conceive, a champagne wine in their reasoning faculties.  The admiral was in debt, Henrietta had no heritage, Chillon John was the heir of a miserly uncle owing him sums and evading every application for them, yet they behaved as people who had the cup of golden wishes.  Perhaps it was because Henrietta and her lover were so handsome a match as to make it seem to them and others they must marry; and as to character, her father could trust her to the man of her choice more readily than to the wealthy young nobleman; of whose discreetness he had not the highest opinion.  He reconciled this view with his warm feeling for the Countess of Fleetwood to be, by saying:  ‘Crinny will tame him!’ His faith was in her dauntless bold spirit, not thinking of the animal she was to tame.

Countess Livia, after receiving Henrietta’s letter of information, descended on them and thought them each and all a crazed set.  Love, as a motive of action for a woman, she considered the female’s lunacy and suicide.  Men are born subject to it, happily, and thus the balance between the lordly half of creation and the frail is rectified.  We women dress, and smile, sigh, if you like, to excite the malady.  But if we are the fools to share it, we lose our chance; instead of the queens, we are the slaves, and instead of a life of pleasure, we pass from fever to fever at a tyrant’s caprice:  he does rightly in despising us.  Ay, and many a worthy woman thinks the same.  Educated in dependency as they are, they come to the idea of love to snatch at it for their weapon of the man’s weakness.  For which my lord calls them heartless, and poets are angry with them, rightly or wrongly.

It must, I fear, be admitted for a truth, that sorrow is the portion of young women who give the full measure of love to the engagement, marrying for love.  At least, Countess Livia could declare subsequently she had foretold it and warned her cousin.  Not another reflection do you hear from me, if I must pay forfeit of my privilege to hurry you on past descriptions of places and anatomy of character and impertinent talk about philosophy in a story.  When we are startled and offended by the insinuated tracing of principal incidents to a thread-bare spot in the nether garments of a man of no significance, I lose patience.