I wonder if she can
have the least remembrance of it or me? or remember her pitying sister
Helen for not having an admirer too? How very pretty is the perfect
image of her in my memory--her brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her
very dress! I should be quite grieved to see _her now_; the reality,
however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of
the lovely Peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my
imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years. I am now
twenty-five and odd months....
I think my mother told the circumstances (on my hearing of her marriage)
to the Parkynses, and certainly to the Pigot family, and probably
mentioned it in her answer to Miss A., who was well acquainted with my
childish _penchant_, and had sent the news on purpose for _me_,--and
thanks to her!
Next to the beginning, the conclusion has often occupied my reflections,
in the way of investigation. That the facts are thus, others know as
well as I, and my memory yet tells me so, in more than a whisper. But,
the more I reflect, the more I am bewildered to assign any cause for
this precocity of affection.
Lord Holland invited me to dinner to-day; but three days' dining would
destroy me. So, without eating at all since yesterday, I went to my box
at Covent Garden.
Saw----looking very pretty, though quite a different style of beauty
from the other two. She has the finest eyes in the world, out of which
she pretends _not_ to see, and the longest eyelashes I ever saw, since
Leila's and Phannio's Moslem curtains of the light.
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