performances much more patently than the run of a quill would reveal it.

She said, 'It is rather a pretty hand, I think.'

'Mrs. Warwick is a practised writer,' said Lady Wathin. 'Writing is her
profession, if she has any. She goes to nurse my cousin. Her husband
says she is an excellent nurse. He says what he can for her. But you
must be in the last extremity, or she is ice. His appeal to her has been
totally disregarded. Until he drops down in the street, as his doctor
expects him to do some day, she will continue her course; and even
then . . .' An adventuress desiring her freedom! Lady Wathin looked.
She was too devout a woman to say what she thought. But she knew the
world to be very wicked. Of Mrs. Warwick, her opinion was formed. She
would not have charged the individual creature with a criminal design;
all she did was to stuff the person her virtue abhorred with the
wickedness of the world, and that is a common process in antipathy.

She sympathized, moreover, with the beautiful devotedness of the wealthy
heiress to her ideal of man. It had led her to make the acquaintance of
old Lady Dacier, at the house in town, where Constance Asper had first
met Percy; Mrs. Grafton Winstanley's house, representing neutral
territory or debateable land for the occasional intercourse of the upper
class and the climbing in the professions or in commerce; Mrs. Grafton
Winstanley being on the edge of aristocracy by birth, her husband, like
Mr. Quintin Manx, a lord of fleets. Old Lady Dacier's bluntness in
speaking of her grandson would have shocked Lady Wathin as much as it
astonished, had she been less of an ardent absorber of aristocratic
manners. Percy was plainly called a donkey, for hanging off and on with
a handsome girl of such expectations as Miss Asper. 'But what you can't
do with a horse, you can't hope to do with a donkey.' She added that she