"Do you know," said I to him one day, "do you know the world talk about hanging you?"
"Eh?" said Wellington.
"They say you will be hanged, in spite of all your brother Wellesley can say in your defence."
"Ha!" said Wellington, very seriously, "what paper do you read?"
"It is the common talk of the day," I replied.
"They must not work me in such another campaign," Wellington said, smiling, "or my weight will never hang me."
"Why you look a little like the apothecary in Romeo already," I said.
In my walks Brummell often joined me, and I now walked oftener than usual: indeed whenever I could make anybody walk with me; because I wanted to meet the man with his Newfoundland dog, who was not the sort of man either that generally strikes the fancy of a very young female; for he was neither young nor at all gaily drest. No doubt he was very handsome; but it was that pale expressive beauty, which oftener steals upon us by degrees, after having become acquainted, than strikes us at first sight.
I had of late frequently met him, and he always turned his head back after he had passed me; but whether he admired, or had indeed observed me, or whether he only looked back after his large dog, was what puzzled and tormented me. "Better to have been merely observed by that fine noble-looking being, than adored by all the men on earth besides," thought I, being now at the very tip-top of my heroics.
Dean Swift mentions having seen, in the grand academy of Lagado, an ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method of building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downwards to the foundation; and which he justified by the like practice of those two prudent insects the bee and the spider. The operation of my love then was after the model of this architect. The airy foundation on which I built my castles caused them ever to descend. Once in my life, when I raised my air-built fabric unusually high, it fell with such a dead weight on my heart, that the very vital spark of existence was nearly destroyed. I have never enjoyed one hour's health since. Now, however, I look on all my past bitter suffering, caused by this same love, which many treat as a plaything and a child, and which I believe to be one of the most arbitrary, ungovernable passions in nature, as a wild dream, remembered by me merely as I recollect three days of delirium, by which I was afflicted after the scarlet fever, with the idea of rats and mice running over my head, and which thus kept me in a frenzy, from the mere working of a disordered brain.