“But, Caroline, how quietly you sit by, while we are talking of you and your lover!” cried Rosamond; “I do not know whether to be provoked with you, or to admire you.”
“Admire me, pray,” said Caroline, “if you can.”
“I do not believe you will ever be in love,” said Rosamond. “I confess I should admire, or, at least, love you better, if you had more feeling,” added Rosamond, hastily.
“By what do you judge that I want feeling?” said Caroline, colouring deeply, and with a look and tone that expressed her keen sense of injustice. “What proof have I ever given you of my want of feeling?”
“No proof, that I can recollect,” said Rosamond, laughing; “no proof, but that you have never been in love.”
“Is it a proof I am incapable of feeling, that I have not been in love with one who has proved himself utterly unworthy of my esteem—against whose conduct my sister cannot find words sufficiently severe to express her indignation? Rosamond, my mind inclined towards him at the first reading of his last letter; but if I had ever given him any encouragement, if I had loved him, what would have been my misery at this moment!”
“All! my dear, but then if you had been very miserable, I should have pitied you so much, and loved you so heartily for being in love,” said Rosamond, still laughing—
“Oh! Rosamond,” continued Caroline, whose mind was now too highly wrought for raillery, “is love to be trifled with? No, only by trifling minds or by rash characters, by those who do not conceive its power—its danger. Recollect what we have just seen: a young, beautiful woman sinking into the grave with shame—deserted by her parents—wishing her child unborn. Do you remember her look of agony when we praised that child? the strongest charm of nature reversed—the strongest ties dissolved; and love brought her to this! She is only a poor servant girl. But the highest and the fairest, those of the most cultivated understandings, of the tenderest hearts, cannot love bring them down to the same level—to the same fate?—And not only our weak sex, but over the stronger sex, and the strongest of the strong, and the wisest of the wise, what is, what has ever been the power, the delusions of that passion, which can cast a spell over the greatest hero, throw a blot on the brightest glory, blast in a moment a life of fame!—What must be the power of that passion, which can inspire genius in the dullest and the coldest, waken heroism in the most timid of creatures, exalt to the highest point, or to the lowest degrade our nature—the bitterest curse, or the sweetest blessing Heaven bestows on us in this life!—Oh! sister, is love to be trifled with?”
Caroline paused, and Rosamond, for some instants, looked at her and at her mother in silence; then exclaimed, “All this from Caroline! Are not you astonished, mother?”
“No,” said Mrs. Percy; “I was aware that this was in Caroline’s mind.”