willing to cast her own repute away with her own hands sooner than not be spoken of at all;' Jane Dashwood's precocious knowledge of the baser side of human nature had prompted her to give a tolerably true summary of one part of Mrs. Strangways' character in the remark, that to Esther had seemed almost unintelligible. Supine in affection, cold in love, passionless in passion, there was yet one desire in this woman's soul that no food could satisfy, no surfeit satiate. She could neglect her children, neglect her home, give up her worldly reputation even, so that she could but purchase that which was a thousand times dearer to her than all-the admiration of men, and the world's acknowledgment of such admiration. To win this, yes, even in any one individual case upon which she had set her mind, she could be patient for weeks, or months, or years; could make a thousand painful and unworthy sacrifices, could bear with indifference or rebuff or insult. The notes which Arthur Peel's sense of honour had allowed him to show Jane Dashwood, were but one sample of the hundred insidious modes of attack that Mrs. Strangways could bring to bear upon the object that, for the time being, she had in view. She was too indolent, possibly too really weak, for the commonest exertions of life to which her master passion did not lend an interest. If she got up to breakfast when she was living at home it made her faint; attempting to teach one of her children his letters was an actual torture to her nerves; to take the commonest care of a household of three servants was a superhuman exertion to her. But she could go to five balls a week; could travel, without halt, from London to Vienna; could go through labyrinths of small intrigues, whose details were all tedious and laborious in the extreme, when she had an object to encompass. The same spirit-unflinching, unresting, unscrupulous -that lay in her fragile body would have made a first-rate general, a first-rate statesman, a first-rate head of the Society of Jesus. Mrs. Strangways being only a woman, and a

VOL. V. NO. XXXI.

pretty woman, her peculiar genius had narrower scope for action. But genius it was. This insatiate passion for love-it is neither passion, nor love itself; it goes with a temperament never made by nature to experience either-has been, I suspect, the real motive-power which has made the great majority of celebrated women celebrated. The cold white hand under whose sway England rose to her greatest glory belonged, you must remember, to just such a woman as Mrs. Strangways. If she had been a queen, do you think she would not have won the hearts of her people, and have chosen the popular religion, and have carried on platonic loves with half her court, and murdered any younger or fairer woman who chanced to stand in her way? It is on the focus from which we look at things, moral as well as physical, that their magnitude depends. As a queen Mrs. Strangways might have been as good and great as Elizabeth. Bound down by fortune, forced to be content with the admiration of dozens and not thousands, to intrigue for the regard of a court made up of men like Arthur Peel, to stab her rivals by words not by the dagger, she was only a miserable, disappointed woman. Already, after a reign of just a dozen years, her courtiers were beginning to grow slack in their devotion; her rivals, bitterer test! to fear her hatred less. Already she was obliged to stoop to humiliating concessions, such as making Jane Dashwood her companion, unless she would lose every satellite who used to do homage round her throne. The ambition which would have made a queen great; the fixed, unshrinking purpose which would have carried a man on to the attainment of any of the honest desires of life,-had brought her to two-and-thirty, scarce beyond her youth, and stranded her there, without any other view of the future than this certainty-that every year should bear her more hopelessly away from the empire which it had been the struggle of all these years of alternate victory and defeat to win!

Mrs. Strangways had married

20

early, and the first two or three years of her married life had been passed in Paris, where her husband then held some small office about the embassy. A great many people held those two or three years responsible for all the errors of her subsequent career. She had learnt French morality, they said, during her Parisian experiences: this is what comes of spending one's youth among the wickednesses of a foreign capital. Others, wider in their views, held that a nature so thoroughly vain and unscrupulous would have ripened into much the same maturity wherever she had lived; indeed (and, whatever the theory, this was true), that Mrs. Strangways did care more for her children and her home in her extreme youth than she ever cared again for either in England. Whether her passionate thirst for admiration was inborn, or partially grafted on her nature by the examples of wedded life that she saw in French society, she was, undeniably, at her present age as perfect in the science of pleasing, as finished in every seductive grace that art can give, as any velvet-eyed Frenchwoman, de trente ans, who ever drew, breath. As perfect; but very far from as happy. A French woman lives and moves and has her being avowedly only for successes of society. It is an institution of her country that she should remain at home the two or three first years after her marriage, then commit her son and daughter to the care of their grandmother or governess, and betake herself to her vie de jolie femme in earnest. She is adored till she is thirty; after thirty, she adores. The two phases of adoration divide the twenty best years of her existence pretty equally; and at forty she sinks quietly into a dressing-gown and devotion for the rest of her life. Circumstances, not any extraordinary bias of her own nature, make her what she is, and French society recognises in her simply the brilliant spoilt child of its own creation. Her family, including the husband, regard her as a model-wife and mother of a family, and a touching epitaph shall one day be suspended above her grave in Père la Chaise,

recording all the angelic domestic virtues and affections of which she was so fair an example when on earth.

But Mrs. Strangways was an Englishwoman. Not the usages of conventional life, but her own innate tendencies, joined to the empire with which beauty of no common order had endowed her, conspired to make her what she was. Every hour of triumph she enjoyed she had to purchase by hours of humiliation; every night of intoxicating success by days and weeks of bitterest mortification. All the homage she received from one sex was made good to her in worse than positive neglect or insolence from the other. She struggled against all this bravely. When everybody so nearly cut her after that last Viennese expedition alluded to by Mrs. Tudor, she gave an immense fancy ball and sent invitations to people who had passed her without recognition the very same day, and bore up against dozens of refusals, and looked handsomer and brighter than ever when the evening of her ball came, and finally fought her way back to the position she had so nearly lost by her own unaided pluck and determination of not allowing her enemies to cast her down. But do you think there was so little of humanity in this woman's heart that she did not feel every indignity -yes, every small stab, every ingenious little cruelty, that was put upon her at that fancy ball? Do you think Mrs. Strangways, or any other woman, ever fought long against the united hosts of her own sex without thousands of poisoned shafts rankling, however hid away, within her breast? Mrs. Strangways endured it: she could have endured more, sooner than give up the one passion which was the very breath of her life: but she felt every cold look, every supercilious bow, to the full as sharply now as she had done when she first began to receive them a dozen weary years ago. More sharply, probably; she had youth and the feelings of youthful beauty to the fore, then; she who had so many slaves among men could easily bear the want of a few friends among women. But now when she

began to see men's eyes following younger faces than hers abroad, when she began to have more frequent and less occupied hours at home, her tired heart dwelt with bitterer emphasis than ever upon every look or word of slight, that she endured, while still the desperation of waning power made her more resolutely loath to accept the lot by which alone her peace with her own sex could have been sealedoblivion.

Mrs. Tudor, bordering on fourscore years (sixty of which, at least, had been spent in frivolity),—Mrs. Tudor, whose own youthful follies were probably still remembered by herself, although buried away from every one else beneath the accumulated dust of half a century-Mrs. Tudor thought it right to find out, precisely, who was visiting Mrs. Strangways before returning the call which she paid to herself and Esther, two days after their meeting in the railway carriage on their return from Weymouth.

'We owe these things to ourselves and to society, child,' she remarked, virtuously, to Esther. It is not what Mrs. Strangways does that it concerns us to pry into; indeed, our charity as Christians demands that we should not be over-scrupulous as to each other's personal and hidden failings. If a certain class of people still visit Mrs. Strangways, we will return her call this afternoon; if not, I will leave a card upon her in the course of the week; and our manner when we meet her next can show that we don't desire any continuance of her acquaintance.'

And Miss Whitty, who usually performed any little dirty work of. the kind for Mrs. Tudor, was sent off at once to ascertain, through such underhand domestic channels as her abilities could suggest, what families of consideration in Bath still continued to invite Mrs. Strangways to their houses.

The result was satisfactory alike to Mrs. Strangways' repute and to Mrs. Tudor's nice moral sense.

'The Davenports and the Wardlaws, mim; and since her fancy ball, Dean Oxenham's family, and I can't tell you how many besides. A

good many people were giving her the cold shoulder after all the odd stories that were afloat upon her return from Germany; but what with her great ball, and her constant tea dansangs, and one thing and another, she's quite up again in public esteem. Most surprising, really, Miss Fleming, how some people can do everything, and yet be visited. I can assure you, the stories about her last spring

'Miss Whitty, I must beg of you not to repeat anything disparaging of Mrs. Strangways to my niece,' interrupted Mrs. Tudor, the whole of whose scruples had received their quietus at the mention of Dean Oxenham's name. These scandals are not in any way improving for young people to hear, and it would be much more becoming in you, at your age, to refrain from trying to injure the reputation of others.'

'But as we were talking about it this morning, mim, I thought

'If you were talking about any subject this morning, it is a quite sufficient reason for your not talking about it this afternoon, Miss Whitty. At all events I must beg of you not to repeat any idle Bath gossip to my niece, in my presence.'

Miss Whitty looked duly guilty for having presumed to think lightly of any one who was visited by the Davenports, and the Wardlaws, and (since her fancy ball) by Dean Oxenham's wife and daughters; and Mrs. Tudor and Esther, in another hour, were receiving very sweet smiles from Mrs. Strangways herself, in the rose-coloured light of that calumniated lady's own drawing-room.

CHAPTER XX.

A SERIOUS BRINGING-UP.

A good deal of a certain kind of gaiety might soon have fallen into Esther's way had she chosen to make the most of it. One dinner, one 'At Home,' and one card party were, however, quite enough to convince her that the dissipations that suited Mrs. Tudor at threescore years and ten, were by no means seductive to

herself at eighteen; and with very sincere good will she begged for the future to be left out of all entertainments in which the amusements of people of her own age were not the primary matter of consideration.

Mrs. Tudor was not likely to dispute a point which promised to save herself the purchasing of white kid gloves and evening dresses for Esther. She thought her dear niece showed a very praiseworthy principle in not wishing to acquire that taste for society which must so inevitably unfit her for her quiet life at home. She would wish her dear niece in this, as in everything else, to consult her own feelings as long as she remained her guest; and her dear niece soon found that she would have five or six evenings in every week very much, indeed, at her own disposal.

The consequence of this freedom to Esther was a great and growing intimacy with Jane Dashwood. Milly made professions still of the deepest regard for her old school friend; but the elements of real affection for anything or person beyond herself were quite rudimentary in poor little Milly's shallow nature. She had liked Esther at school, as she candidly avowed, because Esther wrote her exercises, and mended her stockings for her. She liked her now because she was a complacent listener to narrations of successes, and also-in Millicent's opinion-not good-looking enough ever to stand, at any time, in one's own way. But Jane, who with all her faults could love, had taken a real liking to the repose of Esther's face and nature from the first day on which they ever saw each other in the train. Possibly like Milly, she, too, imagined Miss Fleming to be one who would never rival her in the closest interests of her life; but she saw, too, in her a strong calm character, wholly opposed to her own feverish and fitful one, an original fresh way of thinking widely different to the hackneyed flippancy or assumed reserve of the young women she had hitherto dignified by the name of friends. Esther was the only person of her own sex, except her sister, with whom she had

ever felt anything like real interest in talking; and then Esther did not admire Arthur Peel, and Arthur Peel only thought Esther a finelooking girl, not at all in his style. It was on the occasion when he had expressly stated his final decision on this important subject, that poor Jane first came, self-invited, to spend the evening with Esther, and ask her to allow her, Jane Dashwood, to be her friend for life.

Esther's temperament was not one that urged her on into sudden and violent young-lady friendship under ordinary circumstances; but still Jane Dashwood's companionship was welcome to her. It was difficult to write to Oliver, or even think of him, during all the hours in which Mrs. Tudor left her alone. To her who had seen so little of life there was infinite zest in all Miss Dashwood's savoir vivre and stories of her own conquests, and triumphs, and regrets. It was not unamusing to hear Jane talk of Paul. He was the last man, Esther assured herself, for whom, even if disengaged, she could entertain any other feeling than curiosity; but still it was not uninteresting, in default of better matter, to have his character set forth in Jane's lively way, and from the Dashwood point of view.

With such mutual sources of interest, confidence could scarcely fail of proceeding rapidly between two young women of the respective ages of eighteen and twenty-one. At the end of a fortnight Esther knew every one of the antecedents of Jane's life, except such portions of it as belonged to Arthur Peel; and Jane had received every confidence Esther had to give, except the recountal of those few short weeks that had been the exclusive property of Mr. Carew.

'I am quite glad to see Jane becoming intimate with you, Miss Fleming,' Mrs. Dashwood observed to Esther the second time she saw her. It would be something new to me to see either of Colonel Dashwood's daughters caring for anything more vital than dress, and vanity, and balls. If you find that you acquire the slightest influence

over poor Jane, may I-may I ask you, as a duty you owe to yourself and her, too, to try and turn it to a serious account?'

Esther answered, as civility demanded, that she would be very glad indeed to do anything to serve Mrs. Dashwood; but she had already obtained sufficient insight into Jane's temper to know that whatever influence was to be gained over her must be an indirect one. She might be swayed by example or by love; the kind of war of extermination that her stepmother had carried on against her, ever since she was seven years old, was, Esther felt, the precise means of making poor Jane's heart stand firmest rooted in its own rebellion.

Mrs. Dashwood was a woman of undeniably good intentions. She held firm views as to her own perfectly elect state of mind and excellent future prospects in another world, and really did her best to convince the people she lived with of their errors. Esther's ignorance of theological matters prevented her from discerning whether Mrs. Dashwood's views were high or low, Calvinistic, or Tractarian, or broad. Whatever may have been her doctrines, however, she held them to the extreme, and made her family duly miserable by their propagation. For, in addition to her views, Colonel Dashwood's wife had nerves. Views and nerves both in the same woman! When she got worsted in her frequent theological and moral arguments with Jane, she had nerves to fall back upon at the crowning-point of her defeat. When Colonel Dashwood offended her by his worldliness, in any shape that involved neglect of herself, she could, at the very shortest notice, attire herself, metaphorically, in her grave-clothes, and propose to meet her end. Every man-whatever, in the bracing atmosphere of masculine confidence, he may assert to the contrary-every man that breathes is utterly subjugated and powerless when his wife makes preparations for death. If he struggles, he is made to feel himself a brute, and has to give in in the end: if he does not struggle, he is made equally to feel

himself a brute, and has to give in at the onset. Her step-daughters were sufficiently out of the reach of her immediate and personal power to bear a great many of Mrs. Dashwood's death-throes with fortitude; but long experience had taught her husband that his wisest course lay in prostrate and abject submission, and it was quite beautiful, when he was asked to a whist party or a club dinner, to hear the conditional acceptance depending on poor Mrs. Dashwood's wretched state of health;' that was all the meek, submissive old Colonel dared to give.

6

And yet the meek, submissive old Colonel was far from miserable in his thraldom. Years had accustomed him even to Mrs. Dashwood; and some of his more intimate friends, including his own children, went so far as to say that there was a point of view from which the austerity of his wife's views, and the feebleness of her health, were by

no

means distasteful to Colonel Dashwood. They saved him from the expense of entertaining; and to be saved expenditure in any shape was what Colonel Dashwood lived for. When he summed up in his mind the dinner-parties, the balls, the theatre tickets from which Mrs. Dashwood's views saved him, I can really quite believe that the calculation served to reconcile him to a great many of the intestinal broils and personal bullyings that were his everyday food. The girls had to be married, of course: indeed, Colonel Dashwood's view of daughters went no further than the primary expense of their dress, and his own ultimate hopes of making over this expense into the hands of another man; and with a woman fond of them, and of the things they liked, a woman such as their mother might have been had she lived, what would not have been required of him in costly entertainments every winter? If you set up for ball-giving at all, you must, according to all the laws of wateringplace civilization, give two large balls a year. The supper for a ball costs so much; item, waiters; item, musicians; the musicians alone sufficient to buy his fish in the Bath