Let not those who would judge her harshly forget that Julia, to an
impulsive and passionate nature, added a special and notable
disadvantage. She had been educated in a sphere alien from that in which
she now moved. A girl, brought up as Sir George's cousin and among her
equals, would have known him to be incapable of treachery as black as
this.
Such a girl, certified of his love, not only by his words and
looks but by her own self-respect and pride, would have shut her eyes to
the most pregnant facts and the most cogent inferences; and scorned all
her senses, one by one, rather than believe him guilty. She would have
felt, rightly or wrongly, that the thing was impossible; and would have
believed everything in the world, yes, everything, possible or
impossible--yet never that he had lied when he told her that he
loved her.
But Julia had been bred in a lower condition, not far removed from that
of the Pamela to whose good fortune she had humbly likened her own;
among people who regarded a Macaroni or a man of fashion as a wolf ever
seeking to devour. To distrust a gentleman and repel his advances had
been one of the first lessons instilled into her opening mind; nor had
she more than emerged from childhood before she knew that a laced coat
forewent destruction, and held the wearer of it a cozener, who in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred kept no faith with a woman beneath
him, but lived only to break hearts and bring grey hairs to the grave.
Out of this fixed belief she had been jolted by the upheaval that placed
her on a level with Sir George. Persuaded that the convention no longer
applied to herself, she had given the rein to her fancy and her girlish
romance, no less than to her generosity; she had indulged in delicious
visions, and seen them grow real; nor probably in all St. James's was
there a happier woman than Julia when she found herself possessed of
this lover of the prohibited class; who to the charms and attractions,
the nice-ness and refinement, which she had been bred to consider beyond
her reach, added a devotion, the more delightful--since he believed her
to be only what she seemed--as it lay in her power to reward it amply.
Some women would have swooned with joy over such a conquest effected in
such circumstances. What wonder that Julia was deaf to the warnings and
surmises of Mr. Fishwick, whom delay and the magnitude of the stakes
rendered suspicious, as well as to the misgivings of old Mrs. Masterson,
slow to grasp a new order of things? It would have been strange had she
listened to either, when youth, and wealth, and love all beckoned
one way.