Would he have equally
shunned their acknowledgments and avoided their intimacy, had her
father's request been urged more mildly, less abruptly, and softened
with the grace which women so well know how to throw into their manner,
when they mean to mediate betwixt the headlong passions of the ruder
sex? This was a perilous question to ask her own mind--perilous both in
the idea and its consequences.
Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination
which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it
is true, absence, change of scene and new faces, might probably have
destroyed the illusion in her instance, as it has done in many others;
but her residence remained solitary, and her mind without those means of
dissipating her pleasing visions. This solitude was chiefly owing to the
absence of Lady Ashton, who was at this time in Edinburgh, watching the
progress of some state-intrigue; the Lord Keeper only received society
out of policy or ostentation, and was by nature rather reserved and
unsociable; and thus no cavalier appeared to rival or to obscure the
ideal picture of chivalrous excellence which Lucy had pictured to
herself in the Master of Ravenswood.
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