Yet her passiveness of disposition was by no means owing to an indifferent or unfeeling mind.  Left to the impulse of her own taste and feelings, Lucy Ashton was peculiarly accessible to those of a romantic cast.  Her secret delight was in the old legendary tales of ardent devotion and unalterable affection, chequered as they so often are with strange adventures and supernatural horrors.  This was her favoured fairy realm, and here she erected her aerial palaces.  But it was only in secret that she laboured at this delusive though delightful architecture.  In her retired chamber, or in the woodland bower which she had chosen for her own, and called after her name, she was in fancy distributing the prizes at the tournament, or raining down influence from her eyes on the valiant combatants:  or she was wandering in the wilderness with Una, under escort of the generous lion; or she was identifying herself with the simple yet noble-minded Miranda in the isle of wonder and enchantment.

But in her exterior relations to things of this world, Lucy willingly received the ruling impulse from those around her.  The alternative was, in general, too indifferent to her to render resistance desirable, and she willingly found a motive for decision in the opinion of her friends which perhaps she might have sought for in vain in her own choice.  Every reader must have observed in some family of his acquaintance some individual of a temper soft and yielding, who, mixed with stronger and more ardent minds, is borne along by the will of others, with as little power of opposition as the flower which is flung into a running stream.  It usually happens that such a compliant and easy disposition, which resigns itself without murmur to the guidance of others, becomes the darling of those to whose inclinations its own seem to be offered, in ungrudging and ready sacrifice.  This was eminently the case with Lucy Ashton.  Her politic, wary, and wordly father felt for her an affection the strength of which sometimes surprised him into an unusual emotion.  Her elder brother, who trode the path of ambition with a haughtier step than his father, had also more of human affection.  A soldier, and in a dissolute age, he preferred his sister Lucy even to pleasure and to military preferment and distinction.  Her younger brother, at an age when trifles chiefly occupied his mind, made her the confidante of all his pleasures and anxieties, his success in field-sports, and his quarrels with his tutor and instructors.  To these details, however trivial, Lucy lent patient and not indifferent attention.  They moved and interested Henry, and that was enough to secure her ear.