she never ceased to regret, her ladyship had been well educated; nature had been rather indulgent to her, both in form and feature, nor was she by any means deficient in talent; she dressed well, spoke well, wrote well; her voice was gentle and lady-like, her manners prepos sessing, her appearance fashionable, and yet her mind remained essentially and irredeemably vulgar. Selfish and envious, at once ostentations and sordid, overbearing and obsequious, her's was truly the "meanness that soars, and pride that licks the dust." Fired with emulation and hatred of a sister with whom she had quarrelled for no other reason than because she had made a better match than herself, it was the great object of her life to mortify by eclipsing her in equipage, house, and establishment. This was the motive that had urged her incessant attacks upon Sir Matthew, until she had fairly worried him into a removal from Bloomsbury Square to Portland Place; for the furnishing and decoration of which latter residence, she had received a fixed sum from her plodding husband, who had neither. genius nor time for such occupations. This commission she executed with a tact and good taste that rarely forsook her, so far as externals were concerned. While her rooms displayed a becoming splendour and chaste magnificence, she had carefully eschewed that gorgeousness and over-finery, which, in the mansion of many a civic Croesus, or newly enriched upstart, seems to throw in your teeth the opulence of its possessor, and to arrogate homage as well as admiration. The sure way to win her heart, or rather to prove her want of one, was to declare that she had evinced more taste, and possessed a much handsomer house, than her sister and rival, Mrs. Howard Maltby; when she would enjoy a spleenful triumph, which, with all her exterior politeness and self-possession, she sometimes found it difficult to conceal. It was to establish beyond question her superiority over this competitor, who had been unable to obtain admission to the higher coteries of fashion, that Lady Middleton had entered into the negotiation with the Duchess, of which we have furnished a brief outline, and had advanced money, with much apparent readiness but with great real reluctance, to Lady Barbara Rusport. As Sir Matthew was a shrewd calculator of household expenses, and would not have supplied a shilling for any such ridiculous object, she had drawn these funds from a private purse, which she kept replenished by a system of pinching and even painful domestic economy, little in accordance with the parade and state of her establishment. Denying comforts and almost necessaries to others, in order that she herself might make an additional show of luxuries, she kept her servants upon board-wages, grudged them every petty gratification, withheld from them the customary pickings and perquisites, and practised the most vigilant and illiberal parsimony wherever it could be exercised without detection. Though she never forgot herself so far as to scold or wrangle, her manner towards inferiors was haughty and offensive, even when she affected condescension. This misplaced thrift entailed its usual discomfort. Her servants were perpetually leaving her; none at last would apply who understood their business, or were worth having; the house had been twice robbed by men who had been engaged in a hurry without due inquiry; and poor Sir Matthew was often piqued to regret the happy days, when he had only a single maid of all-work, and brushed his own coat. "Yes, yes," said Lady Middleton, as she paced up and down her drawing-room—“ I think this coup d'etat will effectually mortify Mrs. Maltby." (It was thus she usually termed her sister, gratifying a paltry malice by suppressing the genteeler prefix of Howard.) "The names of my illustrious visitants shall be blazoned in the fashionable Journals, nor shall she pretend not to have seen the list, for I myself will take care to send her half-a-dozen papers." In this strain, occasionally diversified by considering how she should decorate her rooms and her supper-table, she continued to enjoy her anticipated triumph, until her reveries were dissipated by the well-known knock and |