Meanwhile there was a fear that he would lose his chance of marrying the beautiful Miss Durham.

The dilemmas of little princes are often grave.  They should be dwelt on now and then for an example to poor struggling commoners, of the slings and arrows assailing fortune’s most favoured men, that we may preach contentment to the wretch who cannot muster wherewithal to marry a wife, or has done it and trots the streets, pack-laden, to maintain the dame and troops of children painfully reared to fill subordinate stations.  According to our reading, a moral is always welcome in a moral country, and especially so when silly envy is to be chastised by it, the restless craving for change rebuked.  Young Sir Willoughby, then, stood in this dilemma:—­a lady was at either hand of him; the only two that had ever, apart from metropolitan conquests, not to be recited, touched his emotions.  Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen so beautiful a girl as Constantia Durham.  Equally susceptible to admiration of himself, he considered Laetitia Dale a paragon of cleverness.  He stood between the queenly rose and the modest violet.  One he bowed to; the other bowed to him.  He could not have both; it is the law governing princes and pedestrians alike.  But which could he forfeit?  His growing acquaintance with the world taught him to put an increasing price on the sentiments of Miss Dale.  Still Constantia’s beauty was of a kind to send away beholders aching.  She had the glory of the racing cutter full sail on a whining breeze; and she did not court to win him, she flew.  In his more reflective hour the attractiveness of that lady which held the mirror to his features was paramount.  But he had passionate snatches when the magnetism of the flyer drew him in her wake.  Further to add to the complexity, he loved his liberty; he was princelier free; he had more subjects, more slaves; he ruled arrogantly in the world of women; he was more himself.  His metropolitan experiences did not answer to his liking the particular question, Do we bind the woman down to us idolatrously by making a wife of her?

In the midst of his deliberations, a report of the hot pursuit of Miss Durham, casually mentioned to him by Lady Busshe, drew an immediate proposal from Sir Willoughby.  She accepted him, and they were engaged.  She had been nibbled at, all but eaten up, while he hung dubitative; and though that was the cause of his winning her, it offended his niceness.  She had not come to him out of cloistral purity, out of perfect radiancy.  Spiritually, likewise, was he a little prince, a despotic prince.  He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg-shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex’s eyes first of all men.  She talked frankly of her cousins and friends, young males.  She could have replied to his bitter wish:  “Had you asked me on the night of your twenty-first birthday,