Ten years have glided away since we left Ada in tears and pantalets, and she has reached the mature age of twenty-three, “in maiden meditation fancy free.” Not that she ever bestowed a thought upon her childhood’s love—not that she lacked suitors either; for beautiful as one of Domenichino’s dark-eyed sybils, and with too many of the incidental endowments of fortune not to be worshiped for her wealth, if not for her worth, Ada might have had admirers as many as she had thousands. But she chose _not_ to have them; and they might as well have “loved a bright particular star and hoped to wed it;” for Galatea would step from her pedestal for none of them. Always graceful and high-bred, the only charge brought against Ada by the sex who begin life by expecting to bag women’s hearts as they bag pheasants, was, that she returned their assiduities and their flattery with the utmost consummate indifference. “Favors to none, to all she smiles” extended; but beyond that, no word, look, or action ever gave evidence that the beautiful heiress regarded men in any other than in the light of so many monads, representing certain qualities of mind and soul, good or evil. The men of —— were in amazement at such powers of resistance, when they reflected upon the amount of fascination and worth resisted; and Ada became as remarkable as the Rock of Gibraltar, not only in the eyes of the baffled enemy, but in those of certain of her female acquaintances, who, rather than die under the ban of old maidenhood, would have married Bluebeard himself, and therefore looked upon _man_kind as a race of husbands, “to be or not to be”—theirs. But Ada was no Lydia Languish, and had no horror of being called a spinster; neither saw she any thing so attractive in marriage that all the world must go mad for it. Early in life, she had learned, as do all little girls, her lesson of inferiority to a greater sex, and she grew up with a vague idea of the sublimity and wisdom of man, and the folly and ignorance of woman; but by and bye, as faith gave way to reason, she discovered that the lords of the creation were, generally speaking, none the wiser for their usurpation of the glorious privilege of praising God with their intellects, but that three-fourths of this boasting race were as frivolous as if, like woman, they had been all their lives shut out from the Paradise of knowledge, and had not had possession of all the learning of the earth for thousands of years. Moreover, Ada took an exalted view of the condition of old maids; she considered it a position which gave scope for the exercise of a wider philanthropy than is safe or consistent with the duties of a wife and mother; and she wrought up her enthusiasm for the vocation of the sisterhood to such a pitch, that she made up her mind to become one of them. But, “Varium et mutabile semper Fæmina——”