no money, not even honest character, enjoyed
the entry undisputed, circulated among the highest: - because people took her
rattle for wit! - and because also our nobility, Lady Wathin feared, had no due
regard for morality. Our aristocracy, brilliant and ancient though it was,
merited rebuke. She grew severe upon aristocratic scandals, whereof were plenty
among the frolicsome host just overhead, as vexatious as the drawing-room party
to the lodger in the floor below, who has not received an invitation to partake
of the festivities, and is required to digest the noise. But if ambition is
oversensitive, moral indignation is ever consolatory, for it plants us on the
Judgement Seat. There indeed we may, sitting with the very Highest, forget our
personal disappointments in dispensing reprobation for misconduct, however
eminent the offenders.
    She was Lady Wathin, and once on an afternoon's call to see poor Lady
Dunstane at her town-house, she had been introduced to Lady Pennon, a patroness
of Mrs. Warwick, and had met a snub - an icy check-bow of the aristocratic head
from the top of the spinal column, and not a word, not a look; - the half-turn
of a head devoid of mouth and eyes! She practised that forbidding check-bow
herself to perfection, so the endurance of it was horrible. A noli me tangere,
her husband termed it, in his ridiculous equanimity; and he might term it what
he pleased - it was insulting. The solace she had was in hearing that hideous
Radical Revolutionary things were openly spoken at Mrs. Warwick's evenings with
her friends: - impudently named the elect of London. Pleasing to reflect upon
Mrs. Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them some day down with a
crash! Her elect of London were a queer gathering, by report of them! And Mr.
Whitmonby too, no doubt a celebrity, was the right-hand man at these
dinner-parties of Mrs. Warwick. Where will not men go to be flattered by a
pretty woman! He had declined repeated, successive invitations to Lady Wathin's
table. But there of course he would not have had the freedom: that is, she
rejoiced in thinking defensively and offensively, a moral wall enclosed her
topics. The Hon. Percy Dacier had been brought to her Thursday afternoon by Mr.
Quintin Manx, and he had one day dined with her; and he knew Mrs. Warwick - a
little, he said. The opportunity was not lost to convey to him, entirely in the
interest of sweet