"Tell me now," said Caroline, pressing on the wrung withers, "do you not think this excitement, partial and provincial though it be—the sense of beauty, the hope of conquest, the consciousness of power—better than the dull monotony of the Devonshire cottage? Be honest—"
"No, no, indeed!" answered Evelyn, tearfully and passionately; "one hour with my mother, one smile from her lips, were worth it all."
"And in your visions of marriage, you think then of nothing but roses and doves,—love in a cottage!"
"Love in a home, no matter whether a palace or a cottage," returned
Evelyn.
"Home!" repeated Caroline, bitterly; "home,—home is the English synonym for the French ennui. But I hear Papa on the stairs."
A ballroom—what a scene of commonplace! how hackneyed in novels! how trite in ordinary life! and yet ballrooms have a character and a sentiment of their own, for all tempers and all ages. Something in the lights, the crowd, the music, conduces to stir up many of the thoughts that belong to fancy and romance. It is a melancholy scene to men after a certain age. It revives many of those lighter and more graceful images connected with the wandering desires of youth,—shadows that crossed us, and seemed love, but were not; having much of the grace and charm, but none of the passion and the tragedy, of love. So many of our earliest and gentlest recollections are connected with those chalked floors, and that music painfully gay, and those quiet nooks and corners, where the talk that hovers about the heart and does not touch it has been held. Apart and unsympathizing in that austerer wisdom which comes to us after deep passions have been excited, we see form after form chasing the butterflies that dazzle us no longer among the flowers that have evermore lost their fragrance.
Somehow or other, it is one of the scenes that remind us most forcibly of the loss of youth! We are brought so closely in contact with the young and with the short-lived pleasures that once pleased us, and have forfeited all bloom. Happy the man who turns from "the tinkling cymbal" and "the gallery of pictures," and can think of some watchful eye and some kind heart at home; but those who have no home—and they are a numerous tribe—never feel lonelier hermits or sadder moralists than in such a crowd.
Maltravers leaned abstractedly against the wall, and some such reflections, perhaps, passed within, as the plumes waved and the diamonds glittered around him. Ever too proud to be vain, the monstrari digito had not flattered even in the commencement of his career. And now he heeded not the eyes that sought his look, nor the admiring murmur of lips anxious to be overheard. Affluent, well-born, unmarried, and still in the prime of life,—in the small circles of a province, Ernest Maltravers would in himself have been an object of interest to the diplomacy of mothers and daughters; and the false glare of reputation necessarily deepened curiosity, and widened the range of speculators and observers.
Suddenly, however, a new object of attention excited new interest; new whispers ran through the crowd, and these awakened Maltravers from his revery. He looked up, and beheld all eyes fixed upon one form! His own eyes encountered those of Evelyn Cameron!
It was the first time he had seen this beautiful young person in all the eclat, pomp, and circumstance of her station, as the heiress of the opulent Templeton,—the first time he had seen her the cynosure of crowds, who, had her features been homely, would have admired the charms of her fortune in her face. And now, as radiant with youth, and the flush of excitement on her soft cheek, she met his eye, he said to himself: "And could I have wished one so new to the world to have united her lot with a man for whom all that to her is delight has grown wearisome and stale? Could I have been justified in stealing her from the admiration that, at her age and to her sex, has so sweet a flattery? Or, on the other hand, could I have gone back to her years, and sympathized with feelings that time has taught me to despise? Better as it is."