posed, that placing them under the roof with a person so notorious for disobedience and impropriety as Mrs. Penrhyn would improve their manners. With the weakness too common in mothers, and which Louisa would understand some time, she had been induced to pardon her imprudent marriage, and forget the gross improprieties which preceded it; but"
"Gross improprieties!" exclaimed Charles Penrhyn, in a voice of thunder—a voice his gentle wife had never heard before. "What can you mean? What do you dare to insinuate? How can you mingle a thought of my pure"
"Charles, Charles! do not speak so loud, it terrifies me, it does indeed. Mamma means it was wrong to leave the house clandestinely, to take refuge with strangers, do you not, mamma?"
"Certainly I do, madam, thereby forcing your low connexions upon me."
"Ought you not to add, Lady Anne," said Charles, recovering himself a little, "thereby saving me from all wedding expenses, and enabling me to come out in a new light, as a tender mother, with new schemes to entrap the unwary!"
Falsehood is bad to bear—we all shrink from a scandal; but truth is absolutely intolerable; and Lady Anne, with all her practised forbearance, her assumed dignity, plausibility, or whatever other qualities she might inherently possess or occasionally borrow, were put instantly to the route, and violent, unmitigated
