Publisher's Synopsis
In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which renders worthy of record someexperiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencingthe issue was a Christmas visit.In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect who had just begun thepractice of his profession in the midland town of Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went toLondon to spend the Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury. They had gone upto Cambridge in the same year, and, after graduating together, Huntway, the friend, had takenorders.Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought which, exercised onhomeliness, was humour; on nature, picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule, broadcast, it was all three.Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in a new friend is to mostpeople only an additional experience: to him it was ever a surprise.While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived in a street not far from Russell Square. Though they were inno more than comfortable circumstances, the captain's wife came of an ancient family whosegenealogical tree was interlaced with some of the most illustrious and well-known in the kingdom.The young lady, their daughter, seemed to Graye by far the most beautiful and queenly being hehad ever beheld. She was about nineteen or twenty, and her name was Cytherea. In truth she wasnot so very unlike country girls of that type of beauty, except in one respect. She was perfect in hermanner and bearing, and they were not. A mere distinguishing peculiarity, by catching the eye, isoften read as the pervading characteristic, and she appeared to him no less than perfectionthroughout-transcending her rural rivals in very nature. Graye did a thing the blissfulness of whichwas only eclipsed by its hazardousness. He loved her at first sight.His introductions had led him into contact with Cytherea and her parents two or three times onthe first week of his arrival in London, and accident and a lover's contrivance brought them togetheras frequently the week following. The parents liked young Graye, and having few friends (for theirequals in blood were their superiors in position), he was received on very generous terms. Hispassion for Cytherea grew not only strong, but ineffably exalted: she, without positively encouraginghim, tacitly assented to his schemes for being near her. Her father and mother seemed to have lostall confidence in nobility of birth, without money to give effect to its presence, and looked upon thebudding consequence of the young people's reciprocal glances with placidity, if not actual favour.Graye's whole impassioned dream terminated in a sad and unaccountable episode. After passingthrough three weeks of sweet experience, he had arrived at the last stage-a kind of moral Gaza-before plunging into an emotional desert. The second week in January had come round, and it wasnecessary for the young architect to leave tow