sons when they were distinguished, but only at a distance. Mr
Egremont's name had been mentioned too often. It had appeared
coupled with her daughters, even in a Sunday paper. The most
decisive measures were requisite, and they were taken. Still
smiling when they met, still kind when they conversed, it
seemed, by some magic dexterity which even baffled Egremont,
that their meetings every day grew rarer, and their
opportunities for conversation less frequent. At the end of
the season, the Lady Arabella selected from a crowd of
admirers equally qualified, a young peer of great estate, and
of the "old nobility," a circumstance which, as her
grandfather had only been an East India director, was very
gratifying to the bride.

This unfortunate passion of Charles Egremont, and its
mortifying circumstances and consequences, was just that
earliest shock in one's life which occurs to all of us; which
first makes us think. We have all experienced that
disheartening catastrophe, when the illusions first vanish;
and our balked imagination, or our mortified vanity, first
intimates to us that we are neither infallible nor
irresistible. Happily 'tis the season of youth for which the
first lessons of experience are destined; and bitter and
intolerable as is the first blight of our fresh feelings, the
sanguine impulse of early life bears us along. Our first
scrape generally leads to our first travel. Disappointment
requires change of air; desperation change of scene. Egremont
quitted his country, never to return to it again; and returned
to it after a year and a-half's absence, a much wiser man.
Having left England in a serious mood, and having already