what sort of a companion could I have made of Lord Delacour? By this time
he was tired of his horse Potatoe, and his horse Highflyer, and his horse
Eclipse, and Goliah, and Jenny Grey, &c.; and he had taken to hard
drinking, which soon turned him, as you see, quite into a beast.

"I forgot to tell you that I had three children during the first five
years of my marriage. The first was a boy: he was born dead; and my lord,
and all his odious relations, laid the blame upon me, because I would not
be kept prisoner half a year by an old mother of his, a vile Cassandra,
who was always prophesying that my child would not be born alive. My
second child was a girl; but a poor diminutive, sickly thing. It was the
fashion at this time for fine mothers to suckle their own children: so
much the worse for the poor brats. Fine nurses never made fine children.
There was a prodigious rout made about the matter; a vast deal of
sentiment and sympathy, and compliments and inquiries; but after the
novelty was over, I became heartily sick of the business; and at the end
of about three months my poor child was sick too--I don't much like to
think of it--it died. If I had put it out to nurse, I should have been
thought by my friends an unnatural mother; but I should have saved its
life. I should have bewailed the loss of the infant more, if Lord
Delacour's relations and my own had not made such lamentations upon the
occasion that I was stunned. I couldn't or wouldn't shed a tear; and I
left it to the old dowager to perform in public, as she wished, the part
of chief mourner, and to comfort herself in private by lifting up her
hands and eyes, and railing at me as the most insensible of mothers. All
this time I suffered more than she did; but that is what she shall never
have the satisfaction of knowing. I determined, that if ever I had another
child, I would not have the barbarity to nurse it myself. Accordingly when
my third child, a girl, was born, I sent it off immediately to the
country, to a stout, healthy, broad-faced nurse, under whose care it grew