The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

48 REYNOLDS’ WORKS veiling its own loveliness and looking out in a soft, sweet pensiveness. Christian Ashton, with his refined intelligence, and with his feelings of unwarped delicacy, was the very one to ap- preciate the beauty of such a being as Isabella Vincent. To mere physical charms he would perhaps have remained long insensible; but here was mental and moral beauty, the beauty of the soul, mingling with loveliness of form and features in a manner which he had never seen before, save in respect to his own sweet sister Christina. The love with which Isabella had already inspired him — though Heaven knows how unconsciously on her part and how as yet incom- pletely comprehended on his own — was not the mere every- day passion to which the name is so erroneously applied, or which of its own accord usurps the denomination, but it was that love which has something so esthetic in its nature, so ethereal in its essence, so sublimated in its contexture, that it can be explained in no terms falling short of those which would depict it as the lost Elysium of the soul, the veritable paradise of feeling whose sense died out of the hearts of our first parents at the same time that the spell of their im- mortality was broken. Christian could not understand the footing on which Miss Vincent was dwelling beneath the Chubbs’ roof. She was treated with more or less respect, especially by Mr. Chubb, who invariably called her “‘ Miss’ when he spoke to her; and it was only when Mrs. Chubb was in an ill-humour about anything that she addressed herself in rather irritable terms to the young lady, — as indeed she was wont to do toward any one else who came in her way. Christian did not therefore think that Isabella was living there in the light of a dependent; the only conjecture he could form was that she paid for her board and lodging, though not to an amount which rendered the Chubbs so extremely anxious to keep her that their civility became downright servile. In her manner she was diffident and retiring, but not actually reserved, much less awkward or embarrassed. She spoke but little, yet when she did speak, it was with a mild and ladylike affability. Her voice was singularly sweet and melodious, with a tinge of plaintiveness in its tones; her language was well chosen, her remarks were characterized by intelligence. That she had been well educated was evi- CORMICEMOOOK