Chapter 7

Agatha was at this time in her seventeenth year. She had a lively
perception of the foibles of others, and no reverence for her
seniors, whom she thought dull, cautious, and ridiculously
amenable by commonplaces. But she was subject to the illusion
which disables youth in spite of its superiority to age. She
thought herself an exception. Crediting Mr. Jansenius and the
general mob of mankind with nothing but a grovelling
consciousness of some few material facts, she felt in herself an
exquisite sense and all-embracing conception of nature, shared
only by her favorite poets and heroes of romance and history.
Hence she was in the common youthful case of being a much better
judge of other people's affairs than of her own. At the
fellow-student who adored some Henry or Augustus, not from the
drivelling sentimentality which the world calls love, but because
this particular Henry or Augustus was a phoenix to whom the laws
that govern the relations of ordinary lads and lasses did not
apply, Agatha laughed in her sleeve. The more she saw of this
weakness in her fellows, the more satisfied she was that, being
forewarned, she was also forearmed against an attack of it on
herself, much as if a doctor were to conclude that he could not
catch smallpox because he had seen many cases of it; or as if a
master mariner, knowing that many ships are wrecked in the
British channel, should venture there without a pilot, thinking
that he knew its perils too well to run any risk of them. Yet, as
the doctor might hold such an opinion if he believed himself to
be constituted differently from ordinary men; or the shipmaster
adopt such a course under the impression that his vessel was a
star, Agatha found false security in the subjective difference
between her fellows seen from without and herself known from
within. When, for instance, she fell in love with Mr. Jefferson
Smilash (a step upon which she resolved the day after the storm),
her imagination invested the pleasing emotion with a sacredness
which, to her, set it far apart and distinct from the frivolous
fancies of which Henry and Augustus had been the subject, and she
the confidant.

"I can look at him quite coolly and dispassionately," she said to
herself. "Though his face has a strange influence that must, I
know, correspond to some unexplained power within me, yet it is
not a perfect face. I have seen many men who are, strictly
speaking, far handsomer. If the light that never was on sea or
land is in his eyes, yet they are not pretty eyes--not half so
clear as mine. Though he wears his common clothes with a nameless
grace that betrays his true breeding at every step, yet he is not
tall, dark, and melancholy, as my ideal hero would be if I were
as