ABSTRACT
After our declaration of hostilities, Lord Mowbray and I first met on neutral ground at the Opera; Miss Montenero was there. We were both eager to mark our pretensions to her publicly. I appeared this night to great disadvantage: I certainly did not conduct myself prudently – I lost the command of my temper. Lord Mowbray met me with the same self-possession, the same gay careless manner which had provoked me so much during our last interview. To the by-standers, who knew nothing of what had passed between us, his lordship must have appeared the pink of courtesy, the perfection of gentlemanlike ease and good humour, whilst I, unable to suppress / symptoms of indignation, of contempt, and perhaps of jealousy, appeared, in striking contrast, captious, haughty, and at best, incomprehensible. Mr Montenero looked at me with much surprise, and some concern. In Miss Montenero’s countenance I thought I saw more concern than surprise; she was alarmed – she grew pale, and I repented of some haughty answer I had made to Lord Mowbray, in maintaining a place next to her, which he politely ceded to my impetuosity; he seated himself on the other side of her, in a place which, if I had not been blinded by passion, I might have seen and taken as quietly as he did. I was more and more vexed by perceiving that Mr Montenero appeared to be, with all his penetration, duped this night by Mowbray’s shew of kindness towards me; he whispered once or twice to Mr Montenero, and they seemed as if they were acting in concert, both observing that I was out of temper, and Lord Mowbray shewing Mr Montenero how / he bore with me. In fact, I desired nothing so much as an opportunity of quarrelling with him, and he, though determined to put me ostensibly and flagrantly in the wrong, desired nothing better than to commence his operation by the eclat of a duel. If Miss Montenero had understood her business as a heroine, a duel, as every body expected, must have taken place between us, in consequence of the happy dispositions in which we both were this night; nothing but the presence of mind and unexpected determination of Miss Montenero could have prevented it. I sat regretting that I had given a moment’s pain or alarm to her timid sensibility, while I observed the paleness of her cheek and a tremor in her under lip, which betrayed how much she had been agitated. Some talking lady of the party began to give an account, soon afterwards, of a duel in high life, which was then the conversation of the day. Lord Mowbray and I were both attentive, and so was Miss / Montenero: when she observed that our attention was fixed, and when there was a pause in the conversation in which her low voice could distinctly be heard, she, conquering her extreme timidity, and with a calmness that astonished us all, said, that she did not pretend to be a judge of what gentlemen might think right or wrong about duels, but that for her own part she had formed a resolution – an unalterable resolution, never to marry a man who had fought a duel, in which he had been the challenger. Her father, who was in one of the back rows a , leaned forward, and asked what his daughter said – she deliberately repeated her words.
