it affected him, but she pardoned it altogether as it affected
herself. That all her interests in life should be made subservient to
him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts
were discontinued, and her moderate expenses curtailed, because he,
having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that
was his mother's, she never complained. Henrietta had been taught to
think that men in that rank of life in which she had been born always
did eat up everything.

The mother's feeling was less noble.--or perhaps, it might better be
said, more open to censure. The boy, who had been beautiful as a star,
had ever been the cynosure of her eyes, the one thing on which her
heart had riveted itself. Even during the career of his folly she had
hardly ventured to say a word to him with the purport of stopping him
on his road to ruin. In everything she had spoilt him as a boy, and in
everything she still spoilt him as a man. She was almost proud of his
vices, and had taken delight in hearing of doings which if not vicious
of themselves had been ruinous from their extravagance. She had so
indulged him that even in her own presence he was never ashamed of his
own selfishness or apparently conscious of the injustice which he did
to others.

From all this it had come to pass that that dabbling in literature
which had been commenced partly perhaps from a sense of pleasure in
the work, partly as a passport into society, had been converted into
hard work by which money if possible might be earned. So that Lady
Carbury when she wrote to her friends, the editors, of her struggles
was speaking the truth. Tidings had reached her of this and the other
man's success, and,--coming near to her still,--of this and that other
woman's earnings in literature. And it had seemed to her that, within