be romantic, and her delicacy of feeling, which had not been fostered by a careful mother’s hand, did not imbue her mind so completely as to prevent the vicious seed, scattered by her aunt’s dangerous words, from taking spot and growing there. Whenever, in leisure moments, she pondered more particularly over what her aunt had said, she could not help thinking that it was all true. Add to this the natural vanity of a young girl’s head and heart, uncontrolled as yet by either sense or experience, which carried her away in giddy flight to splendid castles, where she strutted about on Persian carpets as their dependent mistress and lady; or into costly carriages, where, by the side of a husband, she drove luxuriously to concerts and theatres through the streets of the capital;—and you will not wonder that, in some measure at least, Jenny became the willing pupil of her teacher.
Time, common sense, and experience, of course, gradually cooled down these wild imaginations, so that her splendid hopes and expectations seemed by degrees become mere empty fancies, which with increasing years faded away into airy nothings. But when she came from Prague to Labutín, to enter upon her new situation in an aristocratic house, the dreams which had been put aside and almost forgotten again rose up and filled her mind. From the warning words of the baroness at their first interview she had come to the conclusion that the young baron must be a libertine; but she soon found reason to reject this idea. Edmund did not seem to belong to the category of young noblemen such as she had imagined them to be; on the contrary, as has been already mentioned, he called forth her sympathies by everything he said or did.
Miss Kuc̓erová had now been one year and a half
