Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
Strange stories are told of her girlish love affairs, which seem to have been indiscreet if nothing worse, while her beauty drew to her many a high-placed wooer, including the Prince of Orange and Prince George of Darmstadt, to all of whom she seems to have turned a cold shoulder. But the wilful Princess was not to be left mistress of her own destiny.
"You were but a cold wooer, I imagine," she added reproachfully, and she rose from the seat and stood aloof from him. "You know well, Miss Ida," he said earnestly, "that a falsehood would be impossible in this place, and I assure you I honestly did the best I could.
Here again she was in love with love, and she idealized the man who came to give it to her. Darnley seemed, indeed, well worthy to be loved, for he was tall and handsome, appearing well on horseback and having some of the accomplishments which Mary valued. It was a hasty wooing, and the queen herself was first of all the wooer.
So returning hastily to her own room, she wrote him a letter which she gave to a trusty servant to deliver, begging her wooer to come to her rooms early the next day, and to undertake nothing without her advice, if he ever wished her to be his wife.
He made as though to leap, but in that moment she had smoothed out the crumpled paper. A glance, and it fluttered to the table. Her laughter was very close to tears. "Monsieur le Vicomte, what a clever wooer you are!" She fled toward the door, opened it, and was gone. The vicomte sat down. "Truly, that woman must be mine!" He took up the paper, smoothed it, and laughed.
At times, he saw her from the distance, leaning over and loitering. "Ah! the lazy thing!" he muttered; "how fond she is of dawdling about!" How could he suspect that, on the other side of the wall, there was a wooer contemplating the girl's smile in the water, and saying to her: "If that red-haired donkey Justin should illtreat you, just tell me of it, and he shall hear from me!"
The seeming damsel smiled on her shaven wooer, but though nothing loth to be won, would not surrender her charms at a less price than certain reliquaries and jewels in the convent treasury a price which the friar in an evil hour consented to pay. He admitted her at midnight within the convent walls, and leading her to the sacristy, took from its antique cabinet the things for which she had asked.
There had not been much harm in the flirtation thus far; but did she know his history, the curse upon his nature? that he was the Wandering Jew of the love-world, how restlessly ideal his fancies were, how the artist in him had consumed the wooer, how he was in constant dread lest he should wrong some woman twice as good as himself by seeming to mean what he fain would mean but could not, how useless he was likely to be for practical steps towards householding, though he was all the while pining for domestic life.
'Si qua voles nubere apte, nube pari! Wilt thou marry well, so marry within thy station! Again Ambrosius, in answering the question what one should look for in a consort, saith: 'Ammorem, morem, rem' Love, morals, means." A good maxim, truly, but for all that the damsel did not write it down in her exercise-book. "And here we have a wooer who possesses all three.
Her eyes had never sunk, her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for the boldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M. de Duc's Lauzunesque blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire's or Miou-Miou's rough overtures; she had the coquetry of her nation with the audacity of a boy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking