Ten years have glided away since we left Ada in tears and pantalets, and she has reached the mature age of twenty-three, “in maiden meditation fancy free.” Not that she ever bestowed a thought upon her childhood’s love—not that she lacked suitors either; for beautiful as one of Domenichino’s dark-eyed sybils, and with too many of the incidental endowments of fortune not to be worshiped for her wealth, if not for her worth, Ada might have had admirers as many as she had thousands. But she chose not to have them; and they might as well have “loved a bright particular star and hoped to wed it;” for Galatea would step from her pedestal for none of them. Always graceful and high-bred, the only charge brought against Ada by the sex who begin life by expecting to bag women’s hearts as they bag pheasants, was, that she returned their assiduities and their flattery with the utmost consummate indifference. “Favors to none, to all she smiles” extended; but beyond that, no word, look, or action ever gave evidence that the beautiful heiress regarded men in any other than in the light of so many monads, representing certain qualities of mind and soul, good or evil.

The men of —— were in amazement at such powers of resistance, when they reflected upon the amount of fascination and worth resisted; and Ada became as remarkable as the Rock of Gibraltar, not only in the eyes of the baffled enemy, but in those of certain of her female acquaintances, who, rather than die under the ban of old maidenhood, would have married Bluebeard himself, and therefore looked upon mankind as a race of husbands, “to be or not to be”—theirs.

But Ada was no Lydia Languish, and had no horror of being called a spinster; neither saw she any thing so attractive in marriage that all the world must go mad for it. Early in life, she had learned, as do all little girls, her lesson of inferiority to a greater sex, and she grew up with a vague idea of the sublimity and wisdom of man, and the folly and ignorance of woman; but by and bye, as faith gave way to reason, she discovered that the lords of the creation were, generally speaking, none the wiser for their usurpation of the glorious privilege of praising God with their intellects, but that three-fourths of this boasting race were as frivolous as if, like woman, they had been all their lives shut out from the Paradise of knowledge, and had not had possession of all the learning of the earth for thousands of years. Moreover, Ada took an exalted view of the condition of old maids; she considered it a position which gave scope for the exercise of a wider philanthropy than is safe or consistent with the duties of a wife and mother; and she wrought up her enthusiasm for the vocation of the sisterhood to such a pitch, that she made up her mind to become one of them. But,

So thought Catharine Ashton, when she heard of these resolves; for she had grown up with very different opinions; and faithful to her convictions, she was on the eve of being married, and wished for nothing in the world so much as that her friend should be as happy as herself. Catharine had spent two years in Europe, and although her lover, Charles Ingleby, had always resided in ——, they met for the first time in Germany, where Ingleby was spending the summer with a friend, whom Catharine never wearied of lauding; for, like a true woman, she was ready to take to her breast any thing and every thing that loved her Charles; and between him and Mr. Stanley, there existed so warm a friendship, that the latter had greatly hurried some business transaction which detained him in Europe, to return in company with his friend and his pretty fiancÉe.

Mr. Stanley was daily expected to perform the part of groomsman to the lovers, and Ada Somers had been chosen to bear him company as bridemaid.

Ada and Mr. Ingleby were the best friends imaginable; and they had, from their first interview, seemed so pleased with each other, as to cause Catharine to hope that all was not yet lost for her poor friend. If she had made so signal an exception in favor of her (Catharine’s) lover, as to grant him the boon of her friendship, what might not be accomplished by a high-minded and estimable man who offered more than friendship? Mr. Stanley, for instance.

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