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40 A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY
tainining them at tea and whist; while Caroline, all unconscious
of the love she inspired, was weeping upstairs in her little garret ;
while Mr. Brandon was enjoying the refined conversation of Gann
and Swigby, over their glass and pipe in the office, Andrea walked
abroad by the side of the ocean ; and, before he was wet through,
walked himself into the most fervid affection for poor persecuted
Caroline. The reader might have observed him (had not the night
been very dark, and a great deal too wet to allow a sensible reader
to go abroad on such an errand) at the sea-shore standing on a rock,
and drawing from his bosom a locket which contained a curl of hair
tied up in riband. He looked at it for a moment, and then flung
it away from him into the black boiling waters below him.
"No other 'air but thine, Caroline, shall ever rest near this
'art !" he said, and kissed the locket and restored it to its place.
Light-minded youth, whose hair was it that he thus flung away ?
How many times had Andrea shown that very ringlet in strictest
confidence to several brethren of the brush, and declared that it was
the hair of a dear girl in Spain whom he loved to madness ? Alas !
'twas but a fiction of his fevered brain ; every one of his friends
had a locket of hair, and Andrea, who had no love until now, had
clipped this precious token from the wig of a lovely lay-figure, with
cast-iron joints and a cardboard head, that had stood for some time
in his atelier. I don't know that he felt any shame about the proceeding,
for he was of such a warm imagination that he had grown
to believe that the hair did actually come from a girl in Spain, and
only parted with it on yielding to a superior attachment.
This attachment being fixed on, the young painter came home
wet through ; passed the night in reading Byron ; making sketches,
and burning them ; writing poems to Caroline, and expunging them
with pitiless india-rubber. A romantic man makes a point of sitting
up all night, and pacing his chamber; and you may see many a
composition of Andrea's dated "Midnight, 10th of March, A. F.,"
with his peculiar flourish over the initials. He was not sorry to
be told in the morning, by the ladies at breakfast, that he looked
dreadfully pale ; and answered, laying his hand on his forehead and
shaking his head gloomily, that he could get no sleep : and then
he would heave a huge sigh ; and Miss Bella and Miss Linda would
look at each other, and grin according to their wont. He was
glad, I say, to have his woe remarked, and continued his sleeplessness
for two or three nights ; but he was certainly still more glad
when he heard Mr. Brandon, on the fourth morning, cry out, in a
shrill angry voice, to Becky the maid, to give the gentleman upstairs
his compliments—Mr. Brandon's compliments—and tell him
that he could not get a wink of sleep for the horrid trampling he