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Ottawa has come to a deplorable state of depression, with regard to "matrimonial transactions;" it is now of vital importance to young ladies, who have an ambition to distinguish themselves at the altar of Hymen, that they take "masculine tastes," as the axis around which is to revolve, in graceful motion, the actions of their daily lives; but for this no one need think of censuring Ottawa's noble women, their conduct is not so servile or dependent as the unfair critic would like to paint it.
"I say, he's a good one, isn't he?" cried Harry, admiring the Ottawa's dauntless courage and his fighting skill. "His eagerness for war will probably be gratified in a few minutes, by the look of things," replied the lieutenant. The Gatineaus were crowding around, and had evidently made up their minds to bring the Ottawa champion to the dust. That they were numbers to one mattered not at all.
Little Miss McCable, who has the reputation of being one of Ottawa's best dancers, bites her lower lips sarcastically, as an admirer of Miss Edgeworth's asks her, "does she not find her dancing faultless," and declares she "kaunt see what there is so striking about her."
Bye-and-bye however, he resolved to come to some conclusion, and thus by getting angry with himself, he narrowed the two inclinations into one, and that assumed the shape of a final decision to give her the same chances as Ottawa's other comfortable daughters. Once his resolution was made, matters grew easy.
This he had publicly declared in a large council of the chiefs, held the preceding night; and the motive of the Ottawa's coming was, to assure the English, that, on this occasion, their great leader was perfectly sincere in a resolution, at which he had the more readily arrived, now that his terrible coadjutor and vindictive adviser was no more.
If such were indeed the case, woman would be more independent in her social standing than she is to-day, but, I blush to say it there are those among Ottawa's fair ones, who are flattered by the attentions and compliments of such as live these two lives of daylight and lamp-light; flattered that an arm should encircle their waists in the dance, which is unworthy of cleaning the shoes they wear, or sweeping the ground they tread, flattered by the attentions and flighty words falling from lips across whose threshold comes the foul breath of sin and dissipation.
He was escorted out of the house where he had shone as a star in the days of his freedom, out of the spot which held all that his poor miserable heart could care for now. Vivian Standish, the bright comet of Ottawa's gay season, seated in a corner of that covered sleigh, on that bright morning, was a hopeless, ruined man, outcast, dejected, wretched.
It takes a rogue to understand a rogue, and the reason of Vivian Standish's complete success in playing off his counterfeit manners, was because he had chosen to display them within a circle where shrewd or suspecting observation never found its way. He saw clearly what a field lay open to him in the drawing-room, and the delightful company of Ottawa's elite.
A man is a man in spite of society's most binding laws; but circumstances are so delightfully blended when a girl is rich, good-looking, clever and disengaged, it is the chance of a lifetime, and were it not that such "chances" as these, usurp the opportunites of Ottawa's patient and less endowed girls, there would be fewer of these old young ladies, who haunt the drawing rooms and public balls of our city, year after year with the same result.
That such a susceptibility does yet flicker in the hearts of Ottawa's young sons, I have reason to hope; for there is an impulse in some of us that leads us into the minds and souls of one another, there to deposit a judgment or a sympathy, or whatever our nature suggests at sight of our neighbor's failings.
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