flippant and the frail fair have made mummies of them. She had the
frankness of her daughter, the same direct eyes and firm step: a face
without shadows, though no longer bright with youth. It may be charged
to her as one of the errors of her strong mind, that she believed
friendship practicable between men and women, young or old. She knew the
world pretty well, and was not amazed by extraordinary accidents; but as
she herself continued to be an example of her faith: we must presume it
natural that her delusion should cling to her. She welcomed Evan as her
daughter's friend, walked half-way across the room to meet him on his
introduction to her, and with the simple words, 'I have heard of you,'
let him see that he stood upon his merits in her house. The young man's
spirit caught something of hers even in their first interview, and at
once mounted to that level. Unconsciously he felt that she took, and
would take him, for what he was, and he rose to his worth in the society
she presided over. A youth like Evan could not perceive, that in loving
this lady's daughter, and accepting the place she offered him, he was
guilty of a breach of confidence; or reflect, that her entire absence of
suspicion imposed upon him a corresponding honesty toward her. He fell
into a blindness. Without dreaming for a moment that she designed to
encourage his passion for Rose, he yet beheld himself in the light she
had cast on him; and, received as her daughter's friend, it seemed to
him not so utterly monstrous that he might be her daughter's lover.
A haughty, a grand, or a too familiar manner, would have kept his eyes
clearer on his true condition. Lady Jocelyn spoke to his secret nature,
and eclipsed in his mind the outward aspects with which it was warring.
To her he was a gallant young man, a fit companion for Rose, and when she
and Sir Franks said, and showed him, that they were glad to know him, his
heart swam in a flood of happiness they little suspected.

This was another of the many forms of intoxication to which circumstances