Her circle was practically the same as it was previous to the coveted nominal rank enabling her to trample on those beneath it.

And women like that Mrs.Warwick, a woman of no birth, 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 checkbow herself to perfection, so the endurance of it was horrible.