Sir Edward Digby had mingled much with the world; he had seen many scenes of different kinds; he had visited various countries, the most opposite to each other; he had frequented courts, and camps, and cities; and he had known and seen a good deal of woman, and of woman's heart; but he had never yet met any one like Zara Croyland. The woman of fashion and of rank in all the few modifications of character that her circumstances admit--for rank and fashion are sadly like the famous bed of the robber of Attica, on which all men are cut down or stretched out to a certain size,--was well known to him, and looked upon much in the light of an exotic plant, kept in an artificial state of existence, with many beauties and excellences, perhaps, mingling with many deformities and faults, but still weakened and deprived of individuality by long drilling in a round of conventionalities. He had seen, too, the wild Indian, in the midst of her native woods, and might have sometimes admired the free grace and wild energy of uncultivated and unperverted nature; but he was not very fond of barbarism, and though he might admit the existence of fine qualities, even in a savage, yet he had not been filled with any great enthusiasm in favour of Indian life, from what he had seen in Canada. The truth is, he had never been a very dissolute, or, as it is termed, a very gay man--he was not sated and surfeited with the vices of civilization, and consequently was not inclined to seek for new excitement in the very opposite extreme of primeval rudeness. Most of the gradations between the two, he had seen at different periods and in different lands; but yet in her who now rode along beside him, there was something different from any. It was not a want, but a combination of the qualities he had remarked in others. There was the polish and the cultivation of high class and finished training, with a slight touch of the wildness and the originality of the fresh unsophisticated heart. There was the grace of education, and the grace of nature; and there seemed to be high natural powers of intellect, uncurbed by artificial rules, but supplied with materials by instruction.