Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/15

 from their formal braid--that it would have beguiled resentment from the most insensible--reconciled to danger the most timid. And yet there was really a grace of humility in the apologies she tendered for her discourtesy and thoughtlessness. As the girl reined her light palfrey by Darrell's side-turning from the young companions who had now joined her, their hackneys in a foam-and devoting to his ear all her lively overflow of happy spirits, not untempered by a certain deference, but still apparently free from dissimulation--Daxrell's grand face lighted up--his mellow laugh, unrestrained, though low, echoed her sportive tones; her youth, her joyousness were irresistibly contagious. Alban Morley watched observant, while interchanging talk with her attendant comrades, young men of high ton, but who belonged to that _jeunesse doree_ with which the surface of life patrician is fretted over--young men with few ideas, fewer duties--but with plenty of leisure--plenty of health--plenty of money in their pockets--plenty of debts to their tradesmen--daring at Melton--scheming at T'attersall's--pride to maiden aunts--plague to thrifty fathers--fickle lovers, but solid matches--in brief, fast livers, who get through their youth betimes, and who, for the most part, are middle-aged before they are thirty--tamed by wedlock--sobered by the responsibilities that come with the cares of property and the dignities of rank--undergo abrupt metamorphosis into chairmen of quarter sessions, county members, or decorous peers;--their ideas enriched as their duties grow--their opinions, once loose as willows to the wind, stiffening into the palisades of fenced propriety--valuable, busy men, changed as Henry V., when coming into the cares of state, he said to the Chief Justice, "There is my hand;" and to Sir John Falstaff,

"I know thee not, old roan;         Fall to thy prayers!"

But meanwhile the elite of this _jeunesse doree_ glittered round Flora Vyvyan: not a regular beauty like Lady Adela--not a fine girl like Miss Vipont, but such a light, faultless figure--such a pretty radiant face--more womanly for affection to be manlike--Hebe aping Thalestris. Flora, too, was an heiress--an only child--spoilt, wilful--not at all accomplished--(my belief is that accomplishments are thought