He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the
infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure wherever it was to be
met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus Sophia met
him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the
more brightly against the dull background of that gross
Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of
the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a
different kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been
married in 1682, at the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years
of wedded life to the fulfilment of the handsome promise of her
maidenhood. But her beauty was spiritualized by a certain
wistfulness that had not been there before, that should not have
been there now had all been well. The sprightliness inherent in
her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her
to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a
little reckless of how or where it offended.
Koenigsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and
knew enough of her story to account for them.
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