A melancholy, grounded and resolved Received into a habit argues love, Or deep impression of strong discontents.
Since my coming home I have found More sweets in one unprofitable dream Than in my life's whole pilgrimage.
Now Mr. Haveloc was at this time enjoying the delightful consciousness that he had been making a great simpleton of himself; but this is a state of feeling which indicates some superiority of character; for your common people when they have been exposing themselves to the derision of all their acquaintance, generally parade themselves with all the dignity of a peacock, and feel convinced that they have been behaving with singular discretion. This state of feeling was agreeably relieved by the knowledge that people had said a great many things of him which were untrue, and which were particularly exasperating to a person of his temperament.
They had filled up the outline of his attentions to Mrs. Maxwell Dorset--attentions far more marked than was consistent with propriety--by a variety of incidents, extremely wrong, but, which was much worse in his eyes, exceedingly ridiculous. They had exaggerated the regard which the lady had abundantly professed for him into an idolatry that was painfully absurd; and they invented a narrative of an unsuccessful attempt on his part to carry her off, which drove him from Florence, and very nearly frantic into the bargain. As he returned to his senses, he contemplated Mrs. Maxwell Dorset with unmixed contempt and disgust. Very exacting and fastidious in his ideas of women, he could imagine nothing more opposed to all his demands of female delicacy and dignity, than this woman, who had for a time blinded him by her flattery, and her foolish and criminal preference. He was angry with her, and still more angry with himself, and yet more enraged against society at large for the unceremonious manner in which they had discoursed of his proceedings; and his feelings of dissatisfaction on the subject were by no means diminished by the knowledge that he was not the first person by very many whom her artifices had enslaved. This fact which of course reached his ears when it was too late--for your friends never tell you of a thing when you might profit by it--in divesting her attachment of the complimentary aspect it might otherwise have worn, opened his eyes more effectually than a score of homilies could have done.