FullReads

Of Adelaide Merton, we may remark, that she was just the kind of a woman to captivate a young man of Fenwick’s character. She was showy in her style of conversation, but exceedingly superficial. Her reading consisted principally of poetry and the popular light literature of the day, with a smattering of history. She could repeat, in quite an attractive style, many fine passages from Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakspeare, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and a host of lesser lights in the poetic hemisphere–and could quote from and criticise the philosophy and style of Bulwer with the most edifying self-satisfaction imaginable–not to enumerate her many other remarkable characteristics.

A second visit to Adelaide confirmed the first favorable impression made upon the mind of Fenwick. At the third visit he was half in love with her, and she more than half in love with him. A fourth interview completed the work on both sides. At the fifth, the following conversation terminated the pleasant intercourse of the evening. They were seated on a sofa, and had been talking of poetry, and birds, and flowers, green fields, and smiling landscapes, and a dozen other things not necessary to be repeated at present. A pause of some moments finally succeeded, and each seemed deeply absorbed in thought.

“Adelaide,” at length the young man said in a low, musical tone, full of richness and pathos–“Do you not feel, sometimes, when your mind rises into the region of pure thoughts, and ranges free among the beautiful and glorious images that then come and go like angel visitants, a sense of loneliness, because another cannot share what brings to you such exquisite delight?”

“Yes–often and often,” replied the maiden lifting her eyes to those of Fenwick, and gazing at him with a tender expression.

“And yet few there are, Adelaide, few indeed who could share such elevating pleasures.”

“Few, indeed,” was the response.

“Pardon me, for saying,” resumed the young man, “that to you I have been indebted for such added delights. Rarely, indeed, have I been able to find, especially among your gentler sex, one who could rise with me into the refining, elevating, exquisite pleasures of the imagination. But you have seemed fully to appreciate my sentiments, and fully to sympathize with them.”

To this Adelaide held down her head for a moment or two, the position causing the blood to deepen in her cheeks and forehead. Then looking up with an expression of lofty poetic feeling she said–

“And, until I met you, Mr. Fenwick, I must be frank in saying, that I have known no one, whose current of thought and feeling–no one whose love of the beautiful in the ideal or natural–has seemed so perfect a reflection of my own.”

To this followed another pause, longer and more thoughtful than the first. It was at length broken by Fenwick, who said, in a voice that trembled perceptibly.

“I have an inward consciousness, that sprung into activity when the first low murmur of your voice fell upon my ear, that you were to me a kindred spirit. Since that moment, this consciousness has grown daily more and more distinct, and now I feel impelled, by a movement which I cannot resist, to declare its existence. First parden this freedom, Adelaide, and then say if you understand and appreciate what I have uttered in all frankness and sincerity?”

Not long did our young friend wait for an answer that made him happier than he had ever been in his life–happy in the first thrilling consciousness of love deeply and fervently reciprocated. To both of them, there was a degree of romance about this brief courtship that fully accorded with their views of love truly so called. The ordinary cold matter-of-fact way of coming together, including a cautious and even at times a suspicious investigation of character, they despised as a mere mockery of the high, spontaneous confidence which those who are truly capable of loving, feel in each other–a confidence which nothing can shake. And thus did they pledge themselves without either having thought of the other’s moral qualities; or either of them having formed any distinct ideas in regard to the true nature of the marriage relation.