There was something deep within her which responded immediately and vehemently to natures that offered a romantic contrast with her own.

Her adoration of Lord Melbourne was intimately interwoven with her half-unconscious appreciation of the exciting unlikeness between herself and that sophisticated, subtle, aristocratical old man.

Very different was the quality of her unlikeness to Napoleon; but its quantity was at least as great.

From behind the vast solidity of her respectability, her conventionality, her established happiness, she peered out with a strange delicious pleasure at that unfamiliar, darkly-glittering foreign object, moving so meteorically before her, an ambiguous creature of wilfulness and Destiny.

And, to her surprise, where she had dreaded antagonisms, she discovered only sympathies.