lowly condition from which she had raised her head only to despise it
with base unrighteousness, and to adopt and reassert the principles
she had abhorred when they affected herself--not merely this, but, in
her own judgment at least, no longer the respectable member of society
she had hitherto been justified in supposing herself. The relation of
her father and mother she felt overshadow her with a disgrace
unfathomable--the more overwhelming that it cast her from the gates of
the Paradise she had seemed on the point of entering: her fall she
measured by the height of the social ambition she had cherished, and
had seemed on the point of attaining. But it is not an evil that the
devil's money, which this legacy had from the first proved to Alice,
should turn to a hot cinder in the hand. Rarely had a more haughty
spirit than hers gone before a fall, and rarely has the fall been more
sudden or more abject. And the consciousness of the behaviour into
which her false riches had seduced her, changed the whip of her
chastisement into scorpions. Worst of all, she had insulted her lover
as beneath her notice, and the next moment had found herself too vile
for his. Judging by herself, in the injustice of bitter humiliation
she imagined him scoffing with his mates at the base-born menial who
would set up for a fine lady. But had she been more worthy of honest
John, she would have understood him better. As it was, no really good
fortune could have befallen her but such as now seemed to her the
depth of evil fortune. Without humiliation to prepare the way for
humility, she must have become capable of more and more baseness,
until she lost all that makes life worth having.

When Mrs. Greatorex had given her what consolation she found handy,
and at length dismissed her, the girl, unable to endure her own
company, sought the nursery, where she caught Sophy in her arms and
embraced her with fervour. Never in her life having been the object of