“There was a custom then, however indelicate and repulsive it may sound to modern ears, for ladies who were doubtful of the intentions of their lovers to demand of them the proof of their purity and honour, by requiring an appeal to their family, and a solemn union under the sanction of the church. Perhaps there was more genuine spirit of truth and chastity in this, than in all the ambiguous flirtation that is carried on with an ill-understood and mysterious dependence on principles that have never been defined, and fidelity that has never been removed. When the lady in the Italian tragedy(22) asks her lover, almost at their first interview, if his intentions are honourable, and requires, as the proof of their being so, that he shall espouse her immediately, does she not utter a language more unsophisticated, more intelligible, more _heartedly_ pure, than all the romantic and incredible reliance that other females are supposed to place in the volatility of impulse,--in that wild and extemporaneous feeling,--that “house on the sands,”--which never has its foundation in the immoveable depths of the heart. Yielding to this feeling, Isidora, in a voice that faultered at its own accents, murmured, “If you love me, seek me no more clandestinely. My mother is good, though she is austere--my brother is kind, though he is passionate--my father--I have never seen him! I know not what to say, but if he be _my_ father, he will love you. Meet me in their presence, and I will no longer feel pain and shame mingled with the delight of seeing you. Invoke the sanction of the church, and then, perhaps,”---- “Perhaps!” retorted Melmoth; “You have learned the European ‘perhaps!’--the art of suspending the meaning of an emphatic word--of affecting to draw the curtain of the heart at the moment you drop its folds closer and closer--of bidding us despair at the moment you intend we should feel hope!”--“Oh no!--no!” answered the innocent being; “I am _truth_. I am Immalee when I speak to you,--though to all others in this country, which they call Christian, I am Isidora. When I loved you first, I had only one heart to consult,--now there are many, and some who have not hearts like mine. But if you love me, you can bend to them as I have done--you can love their God, their home, their hopes, and their country. Even with _you_ I could not be happy, unless you adored the cross to which your hand first pointed my wandering sight, and the religion which you reluctantly confessed was the most beautiful and beneficent on earth.”--“Did I confess that?” echoed Melmoth; “It must have been _reluctantly_ indeed. Beautiful Immalee! I am a convert to you;” and he stifled a Satanic laugh as he spoke; “to your new religion, and your beauty, and your Spanish birth and nomenclature, and every thing that you would wish. I will incontinently wait on your pious mother, and angry brother, and all your relatives, testy, proud, and ridiculous as they may be.