"There was a kind of love-scene between us. I can hardly recall any thing of it, except that I thought him more grand and noble than ever, and full of a magnificent patronage of my nerves and my ignorance. He was several years older than I was, which made a great distance between us, and made me look up to him with a superstitious homage. I remember nothing more about it, only that when I left him, I felt as if I had suddenly grown up into a woman.
"And now came the beginning of the struggle.
"We had other visitors who were better liked by my father. I could not then understand his objections to my Orlando. I have understood them since, and know that he was right in that, if he erred in the rest.
"Among our visitors was one whom I can not speak of without a shudder. There was in him a combination of qualities calculated to inspire me with aversion, which grew from day to day into loathing. I do not believe my father really liked that man. Circumstances, however, had given him an influence in our house, against which it was vain for me to contend. His family was closely connected with my mother; and my father had acquired an estate through his marriage, with which these people were mixed up as trustees; they had, in fact, a lien upon us, which it was impossible to shake off; and by this means maintained a position with us which was at once so familiar and harassing to me, that nothing but my devotion to my father restrained me from an open mutiny against them.
"This man, who was not much my senior in years, but who seemed to have been born old, and to have lived centuries for every year of my life, entertained the most violent passion for me. I had no suspicion of it at first; and as the closeness of our relations threw us constantly together, I was feeding it unknowingly for a long time before I discovered it. I will spare you what I felt when I made that discovery--the horror! the despair!
"When I compared this man, loathsome and hideous to me, with him who was the Orlando, the Bayard, the Crichton of my foolish dreams, it made me sick at heart. So deep was the detestation he inspired, that, young as I was, I would have gladly renounced my own choice to have escaped from him. But there was one consideration paramount even to that; it was my father's desire that I should marry him.