Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/175

Rh The kind of life the half-wild child of the sunny south had to endure with her strait-laced English relative may be conceived: all her warmheartedness was chilled and her girlish affections suppressed, if not blighted. Thrown upon her own resources, she found solace in poetry and in dreams of artistic life. One day, in the fancied seclusion of the grounds, poetic ardour betrayed her into crowning herself, in anticipation of the world's recognition, with a wreath of ivy. Thus bedecked, she was discovered by her cousin, Romney, the heir of the Leigh estates, a calm, earnest philanthropist, who had his dreams—more extravagant even than Aurora's. His ambition was to break down the strong barriers existent between the masses and classes; to elevate the poorest and vilest by the personal intercourse and aid of his own social order. At great personal sacrifice and toil he had commenced the crusade himself, and now, after lecturing Aurora sadly on the folly of her day-dreams, he besought her to relinguish them, and not strive to swerve from "a woman's proper sphere," concluding his harangue by asking her to become his wife.

With all the scorn of her youthful pride Aurora declined to become the wife of "a man who sees a woman as the complement of his sex merely." Romney went his way sadly, leaving Aurora still more sad, for, as the reader sees, and as her aunt saw, she really loved her cousin. Miss Leigh's wrath with her niece when she hears that she has rejected Romney, and the silent torture, a thousand times worse than words, she inflicts upon her, are ended by the sudden death of the aunt. Had not Romney, in succeeding to the Leigh property, endeavoured by a palpable stratagem to invest Aurora with a portion of his inheritance, he might