Maria was shrewd and penetrating. Her self-love had received too many rebuffs in the gay world in which she lived, to blind her to the truth—and she had not listened more than one tedious hour—for the Squire paid long visits—before she discovered that she had made a fatal mistake in his character. She soon perceived that neither the roughness of his manners, nor the random style of his conversation, had left him insensible to the purity of a deep, blue eye, or the magic influence of feminine delicacy and refinement.
And was it to win the heart of such a man that she had so studiously dropped the little she had possessed of feminine reserve, to adopt the coarser and freer manners which she had imagined a sportsman would most admire. She felt the ground was lost, which she had no power to retrieve, and her spirit chafed, with all the bitterness and mortification which those must feel, who have in any way debased themselves to obtain any worldly object, and are conscious of it only when they find themselves disappointed. She would have been still more chagrined could she have divined that nothing but her having so rudely snatched the handkerchief had given a turn to Mabel's thoughts, and prevented her leaving the room, since by doing so, she would have appeared either snubbed or affronted.
Poor Maria! she had never believed herself so near marriage before.
Scarcely had they reached this height of discomfort, when another morning visitor was introduced—Miss Lovelace, with a multitudinous number of light ringlets and narrow flounces. With a nod to Maria, which meant—"I see you are better engaged," she took her seat near the two elder girls, and was soon deep in an account of a charming ball, which she had attended the night before, with which she mixed many hints of her own conquests, together, with her indignation at all the spiteful things people said of her, and the Misses Villars.
After talking, with the utmost rapidity, for half-an-hour, she suddenly changed her tone to one of commiseration, as she enquired—
"And how is poor Lucy?"
"Thank you, she is down stairs to-day," replied Caroline.
"Oh, I am so glad—for I heard such dismal accounts of her, last night, I could not help coming to see how she was. I won't ask to see her—but I do so pity her."
"I suppose her story is half over the town," said Caroline; "silly girl—of course, mamma knew nothing about it, or she would have seen into it before."