It has been often said, and I presume said truly, that no woman—no, not the best and purest, the most modest and considerate of their sex—ever receive a declaration of love from any man, even if the man himself be distasteful to her, even if the love he proffer be illicit and dishonest, without a secret and instinctive sense of high gratification, a consciousness of power, of triumph, a pride in the homage paid to her charms, a sort of gratitude for the tribute rendered to her sex’s loveliness. She may, and will, repulse the dishonorable love with scorn and loathing, yet still, though she may spurn the worthless offering, and heap reproach upon the daring offerer, still she will be half pleased by the offer—if it be only that she has had the power, the pleasure—for all power is pleasure—of rejecting it. She may, and will, gently, considerately, sympathetically decline the honest offers of a pure love which she cannot reciprocate or value as it should be valued; but even if he who made the tender be repulsive, almost odious, still she must be gratified, perhaps almost grateful for that which he has done. To a young girl more especially, just bursting from the bud into the bloom of young womanhood, scarce conscious yet that she is a woman, scarcely awake to the sense of her own powers, her own passions—a creature full of vague, shadowy, mysterious fancies, strange uncomprehended thoughts, and half perceived desires, there is—there must be something of wondrous influence, of indescribable excitement in the receiving a first declaration. And so it was with Theresa Allan. She was, in truth, no angel—for angels are not to be met with in the daily walks of this world—she was, indeed, neither more nor less than a mere mortal woman, mortal in all the imperfection, and narrowness, and feebleness, and inability to rise even to the height of its own best aspirations, which are peculiar to mortality—woman in all the frailty and vanity and variety, no less than in all the tenderness, the truth, the constancy, the loveliness, the sweetness of true womanhood. She was, in a word, just what a great modern poet has described in those sweet lines, “A creature not too bright or good For human nature’s daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.”