Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete

								

and glorious womanhood. Love swelled the swan-like neck, and moulded the
rounded limb.
She was just the kind of person that takes the judgment by storm:
whether gay or grave, there was so charming and irresistible a grace
about her. She seemed born, not only to captivate the giddy, but to turn
the heads of the sage. Roxalana was nothing to her. How, in the obscure
hamlet of Brook-Green, she had learned all the arts of pleasing it is
impossible to say. In her arch smile, the pretty toss of her head, the
half shyness, half freedom, of her winning ways, it was as if Nature had
made her to delight one heart, and torment all others.
Without being learned, the mind of Evelyn was cultivated and well
informed. Her heart, perhaps, helped to instruct her understanding; for
by a kind of intuition she could appreciate all that was beautiful and
elevated. Her unvitiated and guileless taste had a logic of its own: no
schoolman had ever a quicker penetration into truth, no critic ever more
readily detected the meretricious and the false. The book that Evelyn
could admire was sure to be stamped with the impress of the noble, the
lovely, or the true!
But Evelyn had faults,--the faults of her age; or, rather, she had
tendencies that might conduce to error. She was of so generous a nature
that the very thought of sacrificing her self for another had a charm.
She ever acted from impulse,--impulses pure and good, but often rash
and imprudent. She was yielding to weakness, persuaded into anything,
so sensitive, that even a cold look from one moderately liked cut her to
the heart; and by the sympathy that accompanies sensitiveness, no pain
to her was so great as the thought of giving pain to another. Hence it
was that Vargrave might form reasonable hopes of his ultimate success.
It was a dangerous constitution for happiness! How many chances must
combine to preserve to the mid-day of characters like this the sunshine
of their dawn! The butterfly that seems the child of the summer and the
flowers--what wind will not chill its mirth, what touch will not brush
away its hues?

CHAPTER II.


THESE, on a general survey, are the modes
Of pulpit oratory which agree
With no unlettered audience.--POLWHELE.
MRS. LESLIE had returned from her visit to the rectory to her own home,
and Evelyn had now been some weeks at Mrs. Merton's. As was natural,
she had grown in some measure reconciled and resigned to her change of
abode. In fact, no sooner did she pass Mrs. Merton's threshold, than,
for the first time, she was made aware of her consequence in life.
The Rev. Mr. Merton was a man of the nicest perception in all things
appertaining to worldly consideration. The second son of a very wealthy
baronet (who was the first commoner of his county) and of the daughter
of a rich and highly-descended peer, Mr. Merton had been brought near
enough to rank and power to appreciate all their advantages. In early