rendered all she saw around her flat, wearisome, insipid. Nor was this
deep-seated and tender weakness the only serpent--if I may use so confused
a metaphor--in the roses of her lot.

And here I invoke the reader's graver attention. The fate of women in all
the more polished circles of society is eminently unnatural and unhappy.
The peasant and his dame are on terms of equality--equality even of
ambition: no career is open to one and shut to the other;--equality even
of hardship, and hardship is employment: no labour occupies the whole
energies of the man, but leaves those of the woman unemployed. Is this
the case with the wives in a higher station?--the wives of the lawyer, the
merchant, the senator, the noble? There, the men have their occupations;
and the women (unless, like poor Fanny, work-bags and parrots can employ
them) none. They are idle. They employ the imagination and the heart.
They fall in love and are wretched; or they remain virtuous, and are
either wearied by an eternal monotony or they fritter away intellect,
mind, character, in the minutest frivolities--frivolities being their only
refuge from stagnation. Yes! there is one very curious curse for the sex
which men don't consider! Once married, the more aspiring of them have no
real scope for ambition: the ambition gnaws away their content, and never
find elsewhere wherewithal to feed on.

This was Constance's especial misfortune. Her lofty, and restless, and
soaring spirit pined for a sphere of action, and ballrooms and boudoirs
met it on every side. One hope she did indeed cherish; that hope was the
source of her intriguings and schemes, of her care for seeming trifles,
the waste of her energies on seeming frivolities. This hope, this object,
was to diminish--to crush, not only the party which had forsaken her
father, but the power of that order to which she belonged herself; which
she had entered only to humble. But this hope was a distant and chill