But who would marry me! she thought.  An unreproved sensation of melting pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it up in her ’heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say:  ’Be mine!’ His vizor was down, of course.  She had no power of imagining the lineaments of that prodigy.  Or was he a dream?  He came and went.  Her mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl’s chances of winning attention and a husband.  Her father had doated on her face; but, as she argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a beautiful woman, and this was a circumstance that reflected the greater hopelessness on her prospects.  She bore a likeness to her father, little to her mother, though he fancied the reverse and gave her the mother’s lips and hair.  Thinking of herself, however, was destructive to the form of her mirror of knightliness:  he wavered, he fled for good, as the rosy vapour born of our sensibility must do when we relapse to coldness, and the more completely when we try to command it.  No, she thought, a plain girl should think of work, to earn her independence.

‘Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?’ she said.

He laughed out.  ’What ‘s in your head?’

The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and, as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable:  ‘You have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.’

He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly:  ’Livia is one, and Henrietta!

Her ear seized on the stress of his voice.  ‘Henrietta!’ She chose that name for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she thought, with the new element she had been compelled to take into her system, to absorb it if she could.

’You’re not scheming to have them serve as army hospital nurses, my dear?’

‘No, Chillon.’

‘You can’t explain it, I suppose?’

‘A sister could go too, when you go to war, Chillon.’

A sister could go, if it were permitted by the authorities, and be near her brother to nurse him in case of wounds; others would be unable to claim the privilege.  That was her meaning, involved with the hazy project of earning an independence; but she could not explain it, and Chillon set her down for one of the inexplicable sex, which the simple adventurous girl had not previously seemed to be.

She was inwardly warned of having talked foolishly, and she held her tongue.  Her humble and modest jealousy, scarce deserving the title, passed with a sigh or two.  It was her first taste of life in the world.