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This young man was already well known in the modish world of town
for his beauty and adventurous spirit. He was indeed already a beau
and conqueror of female hearts. It was suspected that he cherished
a private ambition to set the modes in beauties and embroidered
waistcoats himself in time, and be as renowned abroad and as much
the town talk as certain other celebrated beaux had been before him.
The art of ogling tenderly and of uttering soft nothings he had
learned during his first season in town, and as he had a great
melting blue eye, the figure of an Adonis, and a white and shapely
hand for a ring, he was well equipped for conquest. He had darted
many an inflaming glance at Mistress Clorinda before the first meats
were removed. Even in London he had heard a vague rumour of this
handsome young woman, bred among her father's dogs, horses, and boon
companions, and ripening into a beauty likely to make town faces
pale. He had almost fallen into the spleen on hearing that she had
left her boy's clothes and vowed she would wear them no more, as
above all things he had desired to see how she carried them and what
charms they revealed. On hearing from his host and kinsman that she
had said that on her birth-night she would bid them farewell for
ever by donning them for the last time, he was consumed with
eagerness to obtain an invitation. This his kinsman besought for
him, and, behold! the first glance the beauty shot at him pierced
his inflammable bosom like a dart. Never before had it been his
fortune to behold female charms so dazzling and eyes of such lustre
and young majesty. The lovely baggage had a saucy way of standing
with her white jewelled hands in her pockets like a pretty fop, and
throwing up her little head like a modish beauty who was of royal
blood; and these two tricks alone, he felt, might have set on fire
the heart of a man years older and colder than himself.
If she had been of the order of soft-natured charmers, they would
have fallen into each other's eyes before the wine was changed; but
this Mistress Clorinda was not. She did not fear to meet the full
battery of his enamoured glances, but she did not choose to return
them. She played her part of the pretty young fellow who was a
high-spirited beauty, with more of wit and fire than she had ever
played it before. The rollicking hunting-squires, who had been her
play-fellows so long, devoured her with their delighted glances and
roared with laughter at her sallies. Their jokes and flatteries
were not of the most seemly, but she had not been bred to seemliness
and modesty, and was no more ignorant than if she had been, in
sooth, some gay young springald of a lad. To her it was part of the
entertainment that upon this last night they conducted themselves as
beseemed her boyish masquerading. Though country-bred, she had
lived among companions who were men of the world and lived without
restraints, and she had so far learned from them that at fifteen
years old she was as worldly and as familiar with the devices of
intrigue as she would be at forty. So far she had not been pushed
to practising them, her singular life having thrown her among few of
her own age, and those had chanced to be of a sort she disdainfully
counted as country bumpkins.
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