Page:Precaution; a novel by Cooper, James Fenimore.djvu/148

136 she thought) of her heart. With him all was perfect; his morals were unexceptionable; his manners showed it; his tenderness of disposition manifest, for they had wept together over the distresses of more than one fictitious heroine; his temper, how amiable! he was never angry—she had never seen it; his opinions, his tastes, how correct! they were her own; his form, his face, how agreeable!—her eyes had seen it, and her heart acknowledged it; besides, his eyes confessed the power of her own charms; he was brave, for he was a soldier;—in short, as Emily had predicted, he was a hero—for he was Colonel Egerton.

Had Jane been possessed of less exuberance of fancy, she might have been a little at a loss to identify all these good properties with her hero; or had she possessed a matured or well-regulated judgment to control that fancy, they might possibly have assumed a different appearance. No explanation had taken place between them, however. Jane knew, both by her own feelings, and by all the legends of love from its earliest days, that the moment of parting was generally a crisis in affairs of the heart, and, with a backwardness occasioned by her modesty, had rather avoided than sought an opportunity to favor the colonel's wishes. Egerton had not been over anxious to come to the point, and everything was left as heretofore; neither, however, appeared to doubt in the least the state of the other's affections; and there might be said to exist between them one of those not unusual engagements by implication which it would have been, in their own estimation, a breach of faith to recede from, but which, like all other bargains that are loosely made, are sometimes violated when convenient. Man is a creature that, as experience has sufficiently proved, it is necessary to keep in his proper place in society by wholesome restrictions; and we have often thought it a matter of regret that some well understood regulations did not exist by which it became not only customary, but incumbent on him, to proceed in his road to the temple of Hymen. We know that it is ungenerous, ignoble, almost unprecedented, to doubt the faith, the constancy, of a male paragon; yet, somehow, as the papers occasionally give us