But what made the principal of the establishment, as she called herself, more wrathful than anything else, was to perceive that the figure on whom these warlike glances rested with the greatest marks of approval and admiration was not one of the young ladies upon whom she “lavished a mother’s care, and conferred a gentlewoman’s education” (see advertisement)--not one of the lady pupils for whom she felt, as she expressed it, “she was responsible, body and soul,” but the majestic person, and the sweet, sad face, of the junior assistant, Mary Delaval! “Had it been myself, for instance,” thought Miss Primrose, drawing up her ample frame with a proud consciousness that, twenty years ago, she, too, had a lover, “or even Miss Meagrim” (the senior assistant, a gaunt and forbidding damsel), “who certainly has a ‘genteel’ figure, or little Miss Dashwood, or rosy Miss Wright, I could have understood it; but the idea of that dowdy thing, with her pale face and her shabby mourning! it only shows the extraordinary tastes men have, and the unaccountable creatures they are from beginning to end.” And so poor Miss Primrose fell to ruminating on certain passages of her own early career, and a blight which nipped her young affections in the bud through the inconstancy of man. “Have you served?” says a Frenchman to his acquaintance. “Have you suffered?” might women as well ask of each other; and there are few amongst them, we fancy, but at one time of their lives have gone through the freemasonry of sorrow. Miss Primrose did not look like a heroine; yet she, too, had had her romance. Well, it had softened her character, for naturally she was a strong-minded woman; and the pretty gipsies over whom she presided little thought how much that austere lady sympathised with all the innocent “_espiègleries_” and girlish follies she thought it right to rebuke so severely.