"I dare say--ma'am--I never expect to be intelligible again. When the 'heart is oppressed with unutterable anguish, condemned to conceal that passion which is at once the torment and delight of life'--when 'his lip, the ruby harbinger of joy, lies pale and cold, the miserable appendage of a mang--' that is, Miss Monson, I mean to say, when all our faculties are engrossed by one dear object we are often incoherent and mysterious, as a matter of course." Tom Thurston came very near wrecking himself on the quicksands of the romantic school. He had begun to quote from a speech delivered by Gouverneur Morris, on the right of deposit at New Orleans, and which he had spoken at college, and was near getting into a part of the subject that might not have been so apposite, but retreated in time. By way of climax, the lover laid his hand on me, and raised me to his eyes in an abstracted manner, as if unconscious of what he was doing, and wanted to brush away a tear. {Gouverneur Morris = American Federalist leader and diplomat (1752-1816)--a 1795 American treaty with Spain granted the United States the right of navigation on the Mississippi River and to deposit goods at New Orleans without paying customs duties} "What a confounded rich old fellow the father must be," thought Tom, "to give her such pocket-handkerchiefs!" I felt like a wren that escapes from the hawk when the rogue laid me down. Alas! Poor Julia was the dupe of all this acting. Totally unpracticed herself, abandoned by the usages of the society in which she had been educated very much to the artifices of any fortune-hunter, and vexed with Betts Shoreham, she was in the worst possible frame of mind to resist such eloquence and love. She had seen Tom at all the balls in the best houses, found no fault with his exterior and manners, both of which were fashionable and showy, and now discovered that he had a most sympathetic heart, over which, unknown to herself, she had obtained a very unlimited control. "You do not answer me, Miss Monson," continued Tom peeping out at one side of me, for I was still at his eyes--"you do not answer me, cruel, inexorable girl!" "What WOULD you have me say, Mr. Thurston?" "Say YES, dearest, loveliest, most perfect being of the whole human family." "YES, then; if that will relieve your mind, it is a relief very easily bestowed."