Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 02

								

her side.  They had a thousand opportunities to converse; and Evelyn now
felt more at home with him; her gentle gayety, her fanciful yet chastened
intellect, found a voice.  Maltravers was not slow to discover that
beneath her simplicity there lurked sense, judgment, and imagination.
Insensibly his own conversation took a higher flight.  With the freedom
which his mature years and reputation gave him, he mingled eloquent
instruction with lighter and more trifling subjects; be directed her
earnest and docile mind, not only to new fields of written knowledge, but
to many of the secrets of Nature, subtle or sublime.  He had a wide range
of scientific as well as literary lore; the stars, the flowers, the
phenomena of the physical world, afforded themes on which he descanted
with the fervent love of a poet and the easy knowledge of a sage.
Mr. Merton, observing that little or nothing of sentiment mingled with
their familiar intercourse, felt perfectly at ease; and knowing that
Maltravers had been intimate with Lumley, he naturally concluded that he
was aware of the engagement between Evelyn and his friend.  Meanwhile
Maltravers appeared unconscious that such a being as Lord Vargrave
existed.
It is not to be wondered at that the daily presence, the delicate
flattery of attention from a man like Maltravers, should strongly impress
the imagination, if not the heart, of a susceptible girl.  Already
prepossessed in his favour, and wholly unaccustomed to a society which
combined so many attractions, Evelyn regarded him with unspeakable
veneration; to the darker shades in his character she was blind,--to her,
indeed, they did not appear.  True that once or twice in mixed society
his disdainful and imperious temper broke hastily and harshly forth.  To
folly, to pretension, to presumption, he showed but slight forbearance.
The impatient smile, the biting sarcasm, the cold repulse, that might
gall, yet could scarce be openly resented, betrayed that he was one who
affected to free himself from the polished restraints of social
intercourse.  He had once been too scrupulous in not wounding vanity; he
was now too indifferent to it.  But if sometimes this unamiable trait of
character, as displayed to others, chilled or startled Evelyn, the
contrast of his manner towards herself was a flattery too delicious not
to efface all other recollections.  To her ear his voice always softened
its tone; to her capacity of mind ever bent as by sympathy, not
condescension; to her--the young, the timid, the half-informed--to her
alone he did not disdain to exhibit all the stores of his knowledge, all
the best and brightest colours of his mind.  She modestly wondered at so
strange a preference.  Perhaps a sudden and blunt compliment which
Maltravers once addressed to her may explain it.  One day, when she had
conversed more freely and more fully than usual, he broke in upon her
with this abrupt exclamation,--
"Miss Cameron, you must have associated from your childhood with