Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/17

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ROMANCE AND REALITY.
11

energy in manhood, and Mr Delawarr's stormy political career was one to call forth every talent; circumstances form the character, but, like petrifying waters, they harden while they form.

To Mrs. Arundel he was the same as any other guest—one who was to eat, drink, and sleep in her house; all her hopes, fears, "an undistinguishable throng," rested with her cook and housemaid.

Emily had at first shrunk back, in that intuitive awe which all little people at least must have experienced—the feeling which fixes the eye and chains the lip, on finding ourselves for the first time in the presence of some great man, hitherto to us an historical portrait, one whose thoughts are of the destinies of nations, whose part seems in the annals of England, and not in its society. If such there be, who can come in contact with a being like this without drawing the breath more quickly and quietly, they have only less excitability than we have; and for them tant pis or tant mieux according to that golden rule of judgment, as it turns out. This, however, wore off; the attention of a superior is too flattering to our vanity not to call it forth, and Emily soon