My thoughts, when I
take my stand to watch by her, come to this conclusion, that,
especially in women, distinction is the thing to be aimed at. Otherwise
we are a weltering human mass. Women must teach us to venerate them, or
we may as well be bleating and barking and bellowing. So, now enough.
You have but to think a little. I must be off. It may have happened
during my absence. I will write. I shall hear from you? Come and see me
mount Black Norman. My respects to your father. I have no time to pay
them in person. One!"
He took the one--love's mystical number--from which commonly spring
multitudes; but, on the present occasion, it was a single one, and
cold. She watched him riding away on his gallant horse, as handsome a
cavalier as the world could show, and the contrast of his recent
language and his fine figure was a riddle that froze her blood. Speech
so foreign to her ears, unnatural in tone, unmanlike even for a lover
(who is allowed a softer dialect), set her vainly sounding for the
source and drift of it. She was glad of not having to encounter eyes
like Mr. Vernon Whitford's.
On behalf of Sir Willoughby, it is to be said that his mother, without
infringing on the degree of respect for his decisions and sentiments
exacted by him, had talked to him of Miss Middleton, suggesting a
volatility of temperament in the young lady that struck him as
consentaneous with Mrs Mountstuart's "rogue in porcelain", and
alarmed him as the independent observations of two world-wise women.
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