'What I throw off is ideal-- Lowered, leavened, like a history of Freemasons, Which bears the same relation to the real As Captain Parry's Voyage may do to Jason's. The grand _Arcanum's_ not for men to see all; My music has some mystic diapasons; And there is much which could not be appreciated In any manner by the uninitiated.'
Adeline, we are told, came out at sixteen:
'At eighteen, though below her feet still panted A Hecatomb of suitors with devotion, She had consented to create again That Adam called "The happiest of Men."'
It will be remembered that when Mary Chaworth married she was exactly eighteen. Her husband was:
'Tall, stately, formed to lead the courtly van On birthdays. The model of a chamberlain.'
'But there was something wanting on the whole-- don't know what, and therefore cannot tell-- Which pretty women--the sweet souls!--call _Soul_. _Certes_ it was not body; he was well Proportioned, as a poplar or a pole, A handsome man.'
This description would answer equally well for 'handsome Jack Musters,' who married Mary Chaworth. Adeline, we are told, took Juan in hand when she was about seven-and-twenty. That was Mary's age in 1813. But this may have been a mere coincidence.
'She had one defect,' says Byron, in speaking of Adeline: 'her heart was vacant. Her conduct had been perfectly correct. She loved her lord, or thought so; but _that_ love cost her an effort. She had nothing to complain of--no bickerings, no connubial turmoil. Their union was a model to behold--serene and noble, conjugal, but cold. There was no great disparity in years, though much in temper. But they never clashed. They moved, so to speak, apart.'
Now, when once Adeline had taken an interest in anything, her impressions grew, and gathered as they ran, like growing water, upon her mind. The more so, perhaps, because she was not at first too readily impressed. She did not know her own heart:
'I think not she was _then_ in love with Juan: If so, she would have had the strength to fly The wild sensation, unto her a new one: She merely felt a common sympathy In him.'
'She was, or thought she was, his friend--and this Without the farce of Friendship, or romance Of Platonism.'
'Few of the soft sex,' says Byron, 'are very stable in their resolves.' She had heard some parts of Juan's history; 'but women hear with more good humour such aberrations than we men of rigour':