that sort.«
    »Of what sort?« Sir Willoughby asked impatiently.
    »Rogues in porcelain.«
    »I am persuaded I shall never comprehend it!«
    »I cannot help you one bit further.«
    »The word rogue!«
    »It was dainty rogue.«
    »Brittle, would you say?«
    »I am quite unable to say.«
    »An innocent naughtiness?«
    »Prettily moulded in a delicate substance.«
    »You are thinking of some piece of Dresden you suppose her to resemble.«
    »I daresay.«
    »Artificial?«
    »You would not have her natural?«
    »I am heartily satisfied with her from head to foot, my dear Mrs.
Mountstuart.«
    »Nothing could be better. And sometimes she will lead, and generally you
will lead, and everything will go well, my dear Sir Willoughby.«
    Like all rapid phrasers, Mrs. Mountstuart detested the analysis of her
sentence. It had an outline in vagueness, and was flung out to be apprehended,
not dissected. Her directions for the reading of Miss Middleton's character were
the same that she practised in reading Sir Willoughby's, whose physiognomy and
manners bespoke him what she presumed him to be, a splendidly proud gentleman,
with good reason.
    Mrs. Mountstuart's advice was wiser than her procedure, for she stopped
short where he declined to begin. He dived below the surface without studying
that index-page. He had won Miss Middleton's hand; he believed he had captured
her heart; but he was not so certain of his possession of her soul, and he went
after it. Our enamoured gentleman had therefore no tally of Nature's writing
above to set beside his discoveries in the deeps. Now it is a dangerous
accompaniment of this habit of diving, that where we do not light on the
discoveries we anticipate, we fall to work sowing and planting; which becomes a
disturbance of the gentle bosom. Miss Middleton's features were legible as to
the mainspring of her character. He could have seen that she had a spirit with a
natural love of liberty, and required the next thing to liberty, spaciousness,
if she was to own allegiance. Those features, unhappily, instead of serving for
an introduction to the within, were treated as the mirror of himself. They were
indeed of an amiable sweetness to tempt an accepted lover to angle for the first
person in the second. But he had made the discovery that their minds differed on
one or two points, and a difference of view in his bride was