ABSTRACT
From the glance Wallace had caught of the Countess at the window, he anticipated her company in his visit to Lady Ruthven; and on finding the saloon lonely, he dispatched Edwin for his mother, that he might not be distressed by the unchecked advances of a woman whom he was obliged to see, as being the wife of Lord Mar; and whose weakness, he pitied, as she belonged to that sex, for all of whom, in consideration of the felicity one of it had once brought him, he felt a peculiar tenderness. Respect the Countess he could not; nor indeed could he feel any gratitude for a preference which seemed to him to have no foundations in the only true basis of love, in the virtues of the object. For as she acted against every moral law, against his declared sentiments, it was evident that she placed little value on his esteem; and therefore he despised, while he pitied, a human creature so ungovernably yielding herself to the criminal sway of her passions.
