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74 A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY
her eye, put out her hand, and took them. "Do you know the
hawthor, Miss Gann, of ' The Faded Violets' ?"
"Author? Oh yes; they are—they are George's!" She
burst into tears as she said that word; and, pulling the little
faded flowers to pieces, went sobbing out of the room.
Dear dear little Caroline ! she has only been in love two months,
and is already beginning to feel the woes of it !
It cannot be from want of experience—for I have felt the noble
passion of love many times these forty years, since I was a boy
of twelve (by which the reader may form a pretty good guess of
my age),—it cannot be, I say, from want of experience that I
am unable to describe, step by step, the progress of a love affair ;
nay, I am perfectly certain that I could, if I chose, make a most
astonishing and heartrending liber amoris; but, nevertheless, I
always feel a vast repugnance to the following out of a subject
of this kind, which I attribute to a natural diffidence and sense
of shame that prevent me from enlarging on a theme that has
in it something sacred—certain arcana which an honest man,
although initiated into them, should not divulge.
If such coy scruples and blushing delicacy prevent one from
passing the threshold even of an honourable love, and setting down,
at so many guineas or shillings per page, the pious emotions and
tendernesses of two persons chastely and legally engaged in sighing,
ogling, hand-squeezing, kissing, and so forth (for with such outward
signs I believe that the passion of love is expressed), if a man feel,
I say, squeamish about describing an innocent love, he is doubly
disinclined to describe a guilty one; and I have always felt a
kind of loathing for the skill of such geniuses as Rousseau or
Richardson, who could paint with such painful accuracy all the
struggles and woes of Heloise and Clarissa,—all the wicked arts
and triumphs of such scoundrels as Lovelace.
We have in this history a scoundrelly Lovelace in the person
going by the name of George Brandon, and a dear, tender, innocent,
yielding creature on whom he is practising his infernal skill ; and
whether the public feel any sympathy for her or not, the writer
can only say, for his part, that he heartily loves and respects poor
little Caroline, and is quite unwilling to enter into any of the slow,
painful, wicked details of the courtship which passed between her
and her lover.
Not that there was any wickedness on her side, poor girl ! or
that she did anything but follow the natural and beautiful impulses
of an honest little female heart, that leads it to trust and love and
worship a being of the other sex whom the eager fancy invests
with all sorts of attributes of superiority. There was no wild