While the Civil War went on
she was still a very young girl; but she passed months of this long
period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in which she felt
herself at times (to her extreme confusion) stirred almost
indiscriminately by the valour of either army. Of course the
circumspection of suspicious swains had never gone the length of
making her a social proscript; for the number of those whose hearts,
as they approached her, beat only just fast enough to remind them they
had heads as well, had kept her unacquainted with the supreme
discipline of her sex and age. She had had everything a girl could
have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of
exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in,
abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London
Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of
Browning, the prose of George Eliot.
These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves
into a multitude of scenes and figures. Forgotten things came back
to her; many others, which she had lately thought of great moment,
dropped out of sight. The result was kaleidoscopic, but the movement
of the instrument was checked at last by the servant's coming in
with the name of a gentleman.
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