Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete

								

air of rank, an eye that fascinates, a smile that wins, the manners
that please, the abilities that command, the world! Handsome, clever,
admired, distinguished--what can woman desire more in her lover, her
husband? Have you ever formed some fancy, some ideal of the one you
could love, and how does Lord Vargrave fall short of the vision?"
"Have I ever formed an ideal?--oh, yes!" said Evelyn, with a beautiful
enthusiasm that lighted up her eyes, blushed in her cheek, and heaved
her bosom beneath its robe; "something that in loving I could also
revere,--a mind that would elevate my own; a heart that could sympathize
with my weakness, my follies, my romance, if you will; and in which I
could treasure my whole soul."
"You paint a schoolmaster, not a lover!" said Caroline. "You do not
care, then, whether this hero be handsome or young?"
"Oh, yes, he should be both," said Evelyn, innocently; "and yet," she
added, after a pause, and with an infantine playfulness of manner and
countenance, "I know you will laugh at me, but I think I could be in
love with more than one at the same time!"
"A common case, but a rare confession!"
"Yes; for if I might ask for the youth and outward advantages that
please the eye, I could also love with a yet deeper love that which
would speak to my imagination,--Intellect, Genius, Fame! Ah, these have
an immortal youth and imperishable beauty of their own!"
"You are a very strange girl."
"But we are on a very strange subject--it is all an enigma!" said
Evelyn, shaking her wise little head with a pretty gravity, half mock,
half real. "Ah, if Lord Vargrave should love you--and you--oh, you
would love him, and then I should be free, and so happy!"
They were then on the lawn in sight of the cottage windows, and Lumley,
lifting his eyes from the newspaper, which had just arrived and been
seized with all a politician's avidity, saw them in the distance. He
threw down the paper, mused a moment or two, then took up his hat and
joined them; but before he did so, he surveyed himself in the glass. "I
think I look young enough still," thought he.
"Two cherries on one stalk," said Lumley, gayly: "by the by, it is not
a complimentary simile. What young lady would be like a cherry?--such an
uninteresting, common, charity-boy sort of fruit. For my part, I always
associate cherries with the image of a young gentleman in corduroys and
a skeleton jacket, with one pocket full of marbles, and the other full
of worms for fishing, with three-halfpence in the left paw, and two
cherries on one stalk (Helena and Hermia) in the right."
"How droll you are!" said Caroline, laughing.
"Much obliged to you, and don't envy your discrimination, 'Melancholy
marks me for its own.' You ladies,--ah, yours is the life for gay
spirits and light hearts; to us are left business and politics, law,
physic, and murder, by way of professions; abuse, nicknamed fame; and
the privilege of seeing how universal a thing, among the great and the