A Broken Blossom Vol. 1 of 3 by Florence Marryat

I thought of this long after I went to bed that night, and for several succeeding days. I felt sure that Tessie liked the Baron, and indeed few girls with hearts that were disengaged could have helped doing so. He was very handsome, with that dark Southern beauty which bespeaks fire and energy, and all that makes a man attractive to a woman. And he was interesting-a more dangerous circumstance still. A halo of romance hung around his ill-fortune and his solitude, even though both had been induced by his own misdeeds. And I doubt, moreover, whether a man's errors, unless directed towards herself, ever closed a woman's heart against him. Although we are but too often the tempters and destroyers of the other sex, we like to flatter ourselves with the idea that we were sent into this world to be their guardian angels. The instinct of maternity, too, is rampant in the breasts of most of us, and a sick man or a naughty man is for the time being very like a child, something that is to be petted and tended and caressed, or coaxed and reprimanded and forgiven. I never heard the girls mention the young Baron de Nesselrode without a word of pity or excuse, and I too had much the same feeling for him.

But I had heard that his present state of poverty was not to last for ever. The interest of his large fortune alone was being annually swallowed by his greedy creditors; and if the Baron could only be persuaded to lose no more money in the interim, a few years' probation would certainly set him free again. Meanwhile his family had utterly refused to assist him, over which piece of cruelty I had heard Tessie properly indignant. But privately I argued that in all probability his family had not the means of doing so. The Baron de Nesselrode was the representative of his race, and his relations were naturally incensed to find that his extravagance had led him to represent it in a ruinous old château at St. Pucelle.