_She_ had never been hounded from pillar to post by shrewish matrons who had no words too bitter for their unprofitable charge.

_She_ had never known what it was to rise up in the morning uncertain where she should lie down at night, or whether there would be any shelter at all for her hapless head; for who could tell that her father would be found at the lodging where he had last been heard of, and how should she obtain even workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector?
To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician.
Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender--Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame and a degradation by reason of obvious decay in the heels of her boots?
"If your father would dress you decently, and supply you with proper boots, I could almost bring myself to keep you for nothing," Priscilla had said to her reprobate kinsman's daughter; "but the more one does for that man the less he will do himself; so the long and the short of it is, that you will have to go back to him, for I cannot consent to have such an expensive establishment as mine degraded by the shabbiness of a relation." Diana had been obliged to listen to such speeches as this very often during her first residence at Hyde Lodge, and then, perhaps, within a few minutes after Priscilla's lecture was concluded, Charlotte Halliday would bound into the room, looking as fresh and bright as the morning, and dressed in silk that rustled with newness and richness.

Keenly as Diana felt the difference between her friend's fortune and her own, she did nevertheless in some manner return Charlotte's affection.

Her character was not to be altered all at once by this new atmosphere of love and tenderness; but she loved her generous friend and companion after her own fitful fashion, and defended her with passionate indignation if any other girl dared to hint the faintest disparagement of her graces or her virtues.

She envied and loved her at the same time.