“What’s the use of snivelling,
And worrying and drivelling?
Sure you might give over now,
And get another lover.”
A Chorus.
Meanwhile, had I wanted solace, it lay close at hand. Theresa was as kind to me as she had been, on our first meeting, rude. I rode with her, sometimes twice a day, and got to like the exercise so well, that I looked forward to it with pleasure. I don’t say the pleasure wasn’t immensely increased by my companion. She talked charmingly, with a mixture of vivacity and good sense that made her conversation refreshing to listen to. She was well-read, as her father had affirmed, but displayed her stores with so much tact and modesty, that I never remember hearing her make a learned allusion of which the appropriateness to the matter under discussion did not entirely extinguish every suspicion of pedantry.
It was manifestly her resolution to charm out of my memory the very false impression of her character she had sought to establish. The sense that my heart belonged to another made her feel perfectly easy with me. She would speak her mind on a great variety of subjects; sentimental arguments were frequent; we could talk of love in an “aibstract sense” like Sidney Smith’s Scotch young lady; reason on the emotions, and puzzle each other with metaphysics. We were both perfectly honest and knew no danger. Moreover we were cousins, and everybody knows the nature of cousins’ rights.
Now I may as well confess—being of opinion that a man ought always to seize the earliest opportunity to tell the truth—that, like most young men of four-and-twenty, I was large-hearted: by which I mean, there beat in my bosom an organ sufficiently elastic to include several objects at once. I have pretty well established my claims to inflammability by my brief reference to Pauline (not to speak of the others, who are nameless) and by the very headlong way in which I had fallen in love with Conny. I am well aware that among a certain order of novelists and novel readers, a hero is thought a very contemptible poor creature if he does not remain undeviatingly true to his first love through forty or fifty chapters of close print; although during his journey through these chapters, he may have to encounter several fascinating and seductive young persons, who exert all the arts they have acquired by a long apprenticeship to the science of love-making, to divert him from the straight path that leads him to the altar, where, robed in the shining nuptial raiment, stands the Only and the True.
If this were an idle work of fiction, instead of a solid and trustworthy narrative of facts, I should, no doubt, pursue the established system, and save the printers a very great deal of labour by enabling them to use some of their stereotypes. But I carry my ink-bottle in my bosom; and into it I dip my pen, whilst memory hoarsely dictates and judgment scowlingly corrects.
Now, do I represent a species, or am I a unique? When I tell you that though I remained fondly attached to Conny through a large number of those days darkened by her barbarous neglect, I could still find a very great pleasure in riding with Theresa, talking to her, listening to her singing, and saying pretty things with a tolerably significant face, will you pronounce me an impossibility, or allow that I acted as a great number of young men have acted, are acting, and will for ever act?