 than her own.
    Yet her passiveness of disposition was by no means owing to an indifferent
or unfeeling mind. Left to the impulse of her own taste and feeling, Lucy Ashton
was peculiarly accessible to those of a romantic cast. Her secret delight was in
the old legendary tales of ardent devotion and unalterable affection, chequered
as they so often are with strange adventures and supernatural horrors. This was
her favoured fairy realm, and here she erected her aërial palaces. But it was
only in secret that she laboured at this delusive, though delightful
architecture. In her retired chamber, or in the woodland bower which she had
chosen for her own, and called after her name, she was in fancy distributing the
prizes at the tournament, or raining down influence from her eyes on the valiant
combatants; or she was wandering in the wilderness with Una, under escort of the
generous lion; or she was identifying herself with the simple, yet noble-minded
Miranda, in the isle of wonder and enchantment.
    But in her exterior relations to things of this world, Lucy willingly
received the ruling impulse from those around her. The alternative was, in
general, too indifferent to her to render resistance desirable, and she
willingly found a motive for decision in the opinion of her friends, which
perhaps she might have sought for in vain in her own choice. Every reader must
have observed in some family of his acquaintance some individual of a temper
soft and yielding, who, mixed with stronger and more ardent minds, is borne
along by the will of others, with as little power of opposition as the flower
which is flung into a running stream. It usually happens that such a compliant
and easy disposition, which resigns itself without murmur to the guidance of
others, becomes the darling of those to whose inclinations its own seemed to be
offered, in ungrudging and ready sacrifice.
    This was eminently the case with Lucy Ashton. Her politic, wary, and worldly
father, felt for her an affection, the strength of which sometimes surprised him
into an unusual emotion. Her elder brother, who trode the path of ambition with
a haughtier step than his father, had also more of human affection. A soldier,
and in a dissolute age, he preferred his sister Lucy even to pleasure, and to
military preferment and distinction. Her younger brother, at an age when trifles
chiefly occupied his mind, made her the confidant of all his pleasures and
anxieties, his success in field-sports, and his quarrels with his tutor and
instructors. To these details, however trivial, Lucy lent patient and not
indifferent attention.
