Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/479

Rh show it distinct from her being. As to any duty arising from her position, she had never heard the word used except as representing something owing to, not owed by, rank. Social standing in the eyes of the superexcellent few of fashion was the Satan of unrighteousness worshipped around her. And the precepts of this worship fell upon soil prepared for it. For with all the simplicity of her nature there was in it an inborn sense of rank, of elevation in the order of the universe above most others of the children of men — greater intrinsic worth therefore in herself. How could it be otherwise with the offspring of generations of pride and falsely conscious superiority? Hence, as things were going now with the more human part of her, some commotion, if not earthquake indeed, was imminent. Nay, the commotion had already begun, as manifest in her sleeplessness and the thoughts that occupied it.

Rightly to understand the sense of shame and degradation she had not unfrequently felt of late, we must remember that in the circle in which she moved she heard, on all sides, professions, arts, and trades alluded to with the same unuttered but the more strongly implied contempt — a contempt, indeed, regarded as so much a matter of course, so thoroughly understood, so reasonable in its nature, so absolute in its degree, that to utter it would have been bad taste from very superfluity. Yet she never entered the painter's study but with trembling heart, uncertain foot, and fluttering breath, as of one stepping within the gates of an enchanted paradise, whose joy is too much for the material weight of humanity to ballast, even to the steadying of the bodily step and the outward calm of the bodily carriage. How far things had gone between them we shall be able to judge by-and-by: it will be enough at present to add that it was this relation, and the inward strife arising from it, that had not only prematurely, but over-rapidly, ripened the girl into the woman.

This my disclosure of her condition, however, has not even yet uncovered the sorest spot upon which the flies settled in the darkness of this torture-hour of the human clock. Although still the same lively, self-operative nature she had been in other circumstances, she was so far from being insensible or indifferent to the opinions of others that she had not even strength enough to keep a foreign will off the beam of her choice: the will of another, in no way directly brought to bear on hers, would yet weigh to her encouragement where her wish was doubtful, or to her restraint where impulse was strong. It would even move her toward a line of conduct whose anticipated results were distasteful to her. Ever and anon her pride would rise armed against the consciousness of slavery, but its armor was too weak either for defence or for deliverance. She knew that the heart of Lady Bellair — what of heart she had — was set upon her marriage with her nephew, Lord Liftore. Now she recoiled from the idea of marriage, and dismissed it into a future of indefinite removal. She had no special desire to please Lady Bellair from the point of gratitude, for she was perfectly aware that her relation to herself was far from being without advantage to that lady's position as well as means: a whisper or two that had reached her had been enough to enlighten her in that direction. Neither could she persuade herself that Lord Liftore was at all the sort of man she could become proud of as a husband; and yet she felt destined to be his wife. On the other hand, she had no dislike to him: he was handsome, well informed, capable — a gentleman, she thought, of good regard in the circles in which they moved, and one who would not in any manner disgrace her, although, to be sure, he was her inferior in rank, and she would rather have married a duke. At the same time, to confess all the truth, she was by no means indifferent to the advantages of having for a husband a man with money enough to restore the somewhat tarnished prestige of her own family to its pristine brilliancy. She had never said a word to encourage the scheming of Lady Bellair; neither, on the other hand, had she ever said a word to discourage her hopes or give her ground for doubting of the acceptableness of her cherished project Hence, Lady Bellair had naturally come to regard the two as almost affianced. But Florimel's aversion to the idea of marriage, and her horror at the thought of the slightest whisper of what was between her and Lenorme, increased together.

There were times, too, when she asked herself in anxious discomfort whether she was not possibly a transgressor against a deeper and simpler law than that of station — whether she was altogether maidenly in the encouragement she had given and was giving to the painter. It must not be imagined that she had once visited him without a companion, though that companion was, indeed, sometimes only her maid — her real object being covered by the true pretext of sitting for her portrait, which 