The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 164: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ZOE 141 love of that esthetic character in which the ancient Greeks believed, but the mere mention of which only provokes the sneer of skepticism in this more worldly-minded and practi- cal age. Nor do we ourselves believe that such love is often found. It is the lost paradise of the soul, of which few are now permitted to obtain a glimpse, much less to receive an infusion of its pure and holy light into the sanctuary of their hearts. Yet such a love as that was Zoe’s, and she cherished it without ever dreaming of aught beyond. The very idea of its realization would have seemed to her a thought tinctured with grossness, if emanating from herself and not inspired by an avowal on the part of its object. Having thus sufficiently introduced Miss Armytage to our readers, we may pursue the thread of our narrative. It was, as we have already said, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon that Zoe, having quitted her boudoir, took her seat in the drawing-room to await the presence of any visitor or visitress who might happen to call. Her father had been with her for about half an hour; she had played to him on the piano and the harp, and he had looked over her portfolio of drawings. Not that he had the faintest idea of music, nor the slightest taste in a pictorial or artistic sense, but he chose to affect a very great fondness for those elegant accomplishments in which his daughter excelled, while he cordially detested the course of reading to which she was particularly devoted. He had only left her at the time of which we are writing, to speak to some one on business who had called at the mansion in the Regent’s Park, for though he had ostensibly retired from commercial affairs by giving up his counting-house in the City, he nevertheless continued in a sort of private manner his financial enterprises by ad- vancing loans on good security. Having transacted whatsoever business it was that had called him away, Mr. Armytage returned to the drawing- room, where Zoe in the interval had taken up one of the books which she had brought from the boudoir. “What are you reading there, my love?” he inquired, leaning over the back of the sofa, which was drawn away from the wall so as to be near one of the centre- tables. _ “ Cowper’s poems,”’ responded Zoe, looking up at her father with a sweet glance, in which there was an amiable Com () LOOKS (EO)