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90 have heard some even talk of their disappointments, as if such a word could be used in the plural. To be crossed in love, forsooth—why, such a heart could bear as many crosses as a raspberry tart.

But Beatrice loved with all the vividness of unwasted and unworn feeling, and with all the confidence of youth. Proud, earnest, and enthusiastic, passion was touched with all the poetry of her own nature. Her lover was the idol, invested by her ardent imagination with all humanity's "highest attributes." Undegraded by the ideas of flirtation, vanity, interest, or establishment, her love was as simple as it was beautiful. Her life had passed in solitude, but it had been the solitude of both refinement and exertion. She was unworldly, but not untaught. She had read extensively and variously. Much of her reading had been of a kind unusual to either her sex or age; but she had loved to talk with her father on the subjects which engaged him; and the investigations which were to analyse the state of mankind, and the theories which were to ameliorate it, became to her matters of attraction, because they were also those of affection. Natural scenery has no influence on the