Jenny drove at a smart pace through the principal ways of Hampstead, whilst the pedestrians whom she passed said to each other ‘There goes the beautiful Miss Crampton,’ and she overheard some of their remarks and flushed with pleasure at the notice she excited. For this young lady’s besetting sin was an inordinate vanity of her personal attractions, which she had cultivated to the exclusion of all the Christian graces. She was a specimen of that most odious of all modern innovations, the fast girl of the nineteenth century, and she was vulgar in consequence, for all fast women are vulgar, and obnoxious in the eyes of everybody but their male admirers. For when will men be ever sensible enough to separate the value of personal beauty and mental charm? Not while they have eyes to see. Once touch their senses, and, for the time their infatuation lasts, you cannot convince them but that the mind and soul of their goddess equal her body in charm. Frederick Walcheren was infatuated with the beauty of this girl, and he believed her disposition to be all that was good and lovable as well. It appeared so to him, for, whenever they met, Jenny was in her best temper, and ready to be pleased with everything. Had he even seen her, as she had been on the present occasion, rude and impertinent to her parents, cruelly sarcastic to her meek and unoffending aunt, and obstinately resolved upon having her own way, he would still have taken her part, declared her to be a suffering angel, and her father and mother most unjust and tyrannical towards her. Shakespeare never wrote a greater truism than when he made Rosalind declare that ‘Love is a madness,’ a madness that blinds our vision, distorts our judgment, and makes all things, not only apparently, but actually, different from what they are; when the rose-coloured spectacles have been torn by circumstance from our eyes, and we wonder we could ever have been such egregious fools as to think that they were otherwise. Miss Crampton, then, with her heart on fire and her soul up in arms, stopped at the first pillar-box she passed, and bade Brunell post the letter which she gave him, the letter she had written in her bedroom and which she knew would reach town before Mr Walcheren left it to meet her at the house of their mutual friends, the Bouchers. And as she flew over the highway, one sentence kept revolving itself over and over in her mind, and the burden of it was, ‘I will never give him up, I will never give him up.’ CHAPTER III.