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“Well, proceed,” cried the lady. “I have driven aunt Margaret from the field, and you will fare no better, I can assure you.”

“Men, you say, are too gross to feel a pure friendship; in the first place, please to explain yourself on this point.”

“Why I mean, that your friendships are generally interested; that it requires services and good offices to support it.”

{interested = not pure, having an ulterior motive}

“While that of women depends on–“

“Feeling alone.”

“But what excites this feeling?” asked Charles with a smile.

“What? why sympathy–and a knowledge of each other’s good qualities.”

“Then you think Miss Miller has more good qualities than Katherine Emmerson,” said Weston.

“When did I ever say so?” cried Julia in surprise.

“I infer it from your loving her better, merely,” returned the young man with a little of Miss Emmerson’s dryness.

“It would be difficult to compare them,” said Julia after a moment’s pause. “Katherine is in the world, and has had an opportunity of showing her merit; that Anna has never enjoyed. Katherine is certainly a most excellent girl, and I like her very much; but there is no reason to think that Anna will not prove as fine a young woman as Katherine, when put to the trial.”

“Pray,” said the young lawyer with great gravity, “how many of these bosom, these confidential friends can a young woman have at the same time?”

“One, only one–any more than she could have two lovers,” cried Julia quickly.

“Why then did you find it necessary to take that one from a set, that was untried in the practice of well-doing, when so excellent a subject as your cousin Katherine offered?”

“But Anna I know, I feel, is every thing that is good and sincere, and our sympathies drew us together. Katherine I loved naturally.”

“How naturally?”

“Is it not natural to love your relatives?” said Julia in surprise.

“No,” was the brief answer.

“Surely, Charles Weston, you think me a simpleton. Does not every parent love its child by natural instinct?”

“No: no more than you love any of your amusements from instinct. If the parent was present with a child that he did not know to be his own, would instinct, think you, discover their vicinity?”

“Certainly not, if they had never met before; but then, as soon as he knew it to be his, he would love it from nature.”

“It is a complicated question, and one that involves a thousand connected feelings,” said Charles. “But all love, at least all love of the heart, springs from the causes you mentioned to your aunt–good offices, a dependence on each other, and habit.”

“Yes, and nature too,” said the young lady rather positively; “and I contend, that natural lore, and love from sympathy, are two distinct things.”

“Very different, I allow,” said Charles; “only I very much doubt the durability of that affection which has no better foundation than fancy.”

“You use such queer terms, Charles, that you do not treat the subject fairly. Calling innate evidence of worth by the name of fancy, is not candid.”

“Now, indeed, your own terms puzzle me,” said Charles, smiling. “What is innate evidence of worth?”

“Why, a conviction that another possesses all that you esteem yourself, and is discovered by congenial feelings and natural sympathies.”

“Upon my word, Julia, you are quite a casuist on this subject. Does love, then, between the sexes depend on this congenial sympathy and innate evidence?”

“Now you talk on a subject that I do not understand,” said Julia, blushing; and, catching up the highly prized work, she ran to her own room, leaving the young man in a state of mingled admiration and pity.

CHAPTER II.

AN anxious fortnight was passed by Julia Warren, after this conversation, without bringing any tidings from her friend. She watched, with feverish restlessness, each steam-boat that passed the door on its busy way towards the metropolis, and met the servant each day at the gate of the lawn on his return from the city; but it was only to receive added disappointments. At length Charles Weston good-naturedly offered his own services, laughingly declaring, that his luck was never known to fail. Julia herself had written several long epistles to Anna, and it was now the proper time that some of these should be answered, independently of the thousand promises from her friend of writing regularly from every post-office that she might pass on her route to the Gennessee. But the happy moment had arrived when disappointments were to cease.