Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 05

								

a certain age.  It revives many of those lighter and more graceful images
connected with the wandering desires of youth,--shadows that crossed us,
and seemed love, but were not; having much of the grace and charm, but
none of the passion and the tragedy, of love.  So many of our earliest
and gentlest recollections are connected with those chalked floors, and
that music painfully gay, and those quiet nooks and corners, where the
talk that hovers about the heart and does not touch it has been held.
Apart and unsympathizing in that austerer wisdom which comes to us after
deep passions have been excited, we see form after form chasing the
butterflies that dazzle us no longer among the flowers that have evermore
lost their fragrance.
Somehow or other, it is one of the scenes that remind us most forcibly of
the loss of youth!  We are brought so closely in contact with the young
and with the short-lived pleasures that once pleased us, and have
forfeited all bloom.  Happy the man who turns from "the tinkling cymbal"
and "the gallery of pictures," and can think of some watchful eye and
some kind heart at home; but those who have no home--and they are a
numerous tribe--never feel lonelier hermits or sadder moralists than in
such a crowd.
Maltravers leaned abstractedly against the wall, and some such
reflections, perhaps, passed within, as the plumes waved and the diamonds
glittered around him.  Ever too proud to be vain, the monstrari digito
had not flattered even in the commencement of his career.  And now he
heeded not the eyes that sought his look, nor the admiring murmur of lips
anxious to be overheard.  Affluent, well-born, unmarried, and still in
the prime of life,--in the small circles of a province, Ernest Maltravers
would in himself have been an object of interest to the diplomacy of
mothers and daughters; and the false glare of reputation necessarily
deepened curiosity, and widened the range of speculators and observers.
Suddenly, however, a new object of attention excited new interest; new
whispers ran through the crowd, and these awakened Maltravers from his
revery.  He looked up, and beheld all eyes fixed upon one form!  His own
eyes encountered those of Evelyn Cameron!
It was the first time he had seen this beautiful young person in all the
eclat, pomp, and circumstance of her station, as the heiress of the
opulent Templeton,--the first time he had seen her the cynosure of
crowds, who, had her features been homely, would have admired the charms
of her fortune in her face.  And now, as radiant with youth, and the
flush of excitement on her soft cheek, she met his eye, he said to
himself: "And could I have wished one so new to the world to have united
her lot with a man for whom all that to her is delight has grown
wearisome and stale?  Could I have been justified in stealing her from
the admiration that, at her age and to her sex, has so sweet a flattery?