to direct him?  I need direction.  My lord and sovereign must fix my mind.  I am volatile, earthly, not to be trusted if I do not worship.  He himself said to me that—­he reads our characters.  “Nothing but a proved hero will satisfy Henrietta,” his words!  And the hero must be shining like a beacon-fire kept in a blaze.  Quite true; I own it.  Is Chillon Kirby satisfied?  He ought to be.

’But oh!—­to be yoked is an insufferable thought, unless we name all the conditions.  But to be yoked to a creature of impulses!  Really I could only describe his erratic nature by commending you to the study of a dragon-fly.  It would map you an idea of what he has been in the twenty-four hours since we had him here.  They tell me a vain sort of person is the cause.  Can she be the cause of his resolving to have a residence here, to buy up half the valley—­erecting a royal palace—­and marking out the site—­raving about it in the wildest language, poetical if it had been a little reasonable—­and then, after a night, suddenly, unaccountably, hating the place, and being under the necessity of flying from it in hot haste, tearing us all away, as if we were attached to a kite that will neither mount nor fall, but rushes about headlong.  Has he heard, or suspected? or seen certain boxes bearing a name?  Livia has no suspicion, though she thinks me wonderfully contented in so dull a place, where it has rained nine days in a fortnight.  I ask myself whether my manner of greeting him betrayed my expectation of another.  He has brains.  It is the greatest of errors to suppose him at all like the common run of rich young noblemen.  He seems to thirst for brilliant wits and original sayings.  His ambition is to lead all England in everything!  I readily acknowledge that he has generous ideas too; but try to hold him, deny him his liberty, and it would be seen how desperate and relentless he would be to get loose.  Of this I am convinced:  he would be either the most abject of lovers, or a woman (if it turned out not to be love) would find him the most unscrupulous of yoke-fellows.  Yoke-fellow!  She would not have her reason in consenting.  A lamb and a furious bull!  Papa and I have had a serious talk.  He shuts his ears to my comparisons, but admits, that as I am the principal person concerned, etc.  Rich and a nobleman is too tempting for an anxious father; and Livia’s influence is paramount.  She has not said a syllable in depreciation of you.  That is to her credit.  She also admits that I must yield freely if at all, and she grants me the use of similes; but her tactics are to contest them one by one, and the admirable pretender is not as shifty as the mariner’s breeze, he is not like the wandering spark in burnt paper, of which you cannot say whether it is chasing or chased:  it is I who am the shifty Pole to the steadiest of magnets.  She is a princess in other things besides her superiority to Physics.  There will be wild scenes at Baden.