Page:Four interesting tales.pdf/11

11 determined to be content where discontent would have availed her nothing.

Though Maria was the first-born, Charlotte stood not upon ceremony, and married, “Now,” said Maria, “if my nose be not an insurmountable obstruction, the conjugal road is without impediment.” As she finished the sentence, Mr Conway was introduced : he was—in short, he was six feet high.

When Maria perceived the skirt of a coat, she involuntarily applied a kerchief to her face. It requires so much magnanimity to expose a red nose, unabashed by observation, as to conceal a handsome one beneath a mask. Conway was struck with the exact symmetry of her form and the gracefulness of her motions. A man is ever in a hurry to be in love, and ever in haste to be out again. A few moments conversation satisfied Conway that Maria’s sentiments were just, her judgment powerful, and her imagination delicate ; that she applauded not before she understood, nor simpered forth thanks for those indiscriminate compliments which appear to convey politeness, but which originate in contumely and disdain.—Thus in a little hour, to the eyes of Conway, Maria breathed a phœnix. He had not seen her nose.

Man is a weathercock; the child of caprice, the offspring of inconstancy. At the moment Conway was on the eve of confessing that the charms of Maria’s conversation, the sublimity of her conceptions, and the unaffected ingenuity of her manners, had won his unalterable affection ; at that very moment his opinion changed, and he no longer thought her conversation charming, her conceptions sublime, or her manners unaffectedly ingenuous. He had seen her nose.

He bit his lips, made his bow, and departed. Maria perceived the sudden revolution in the apostate’s sentiments, and accounted for it with