222 PRÆTERITA-I

fragile, fair, freckled, sensitive slip of a girl about sixteen; graceful in an unfinished and small wild-flower sort of a way, extremely intelligent, affectionate, wholly right-minded, and mild in piety. An altogether sweet and delicate creature of ordinary sort, not pretty, but quite pleasant to see, especially if her eyes were looking your way, and her mind with them.

248. We got to like each other in a mildly confidential way in the course of a week. We disputed on the relative dignities of music and painting; and I wrote an essay nine foolscap pages long,¹ proposing the entire establishment of my own opinions, and the total discomfiture and overthrow of hers, according to my usual manner of paying court to my mistresses.² Charlotte Withers, however, thought I did her great honour, and carried away the essay as if it had been a school prize.

And, as I said, if my father and mother had chosen to keep her a month longer, we should have fallen quite melodiously and quietly in love; and they might have given me an excellently pleasant little wife, and set me up, geology and all, in the coal business, without any resistance or farther trouble on my part. I don’t suppose the idea ever occurred to them; Charlotte was not the kind of person they proposed for me. So Charlotte went away at the week’s end, when her father was ready for her. I walked with her to Camberwell Green, and we said good-bye, rather sorrowfully, at the corner of the New Road; and that possibility of meek happiness vanished for ever. A little while afterwards, her father “negotiated” a marriage for her with a well-to-do Newcastle trader, whom she took because she was bid. He treated her pretty much as one of his coal sacks, and in a year or two she died.

249. Very dimly, and rather against my own will, the incident showed me what my mother had once or twice

¹ [Now printed in Vol. I. pp. 267-285.]

² [See above, p. 180.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]