are bewildered in blushes and blonde—diamonds and satin supersede your maiden pearls and gauze—another fortnight, and you are being hurried over the continent with all the rapidity of four horses and felicity, or else giving a month to myrtles, moonlight, and matrimony. Of your consequent happiness I need not speak: 'tis true your duties take a higher character—you have a husband to manage—a visiting-list to decide—perhaps have the mighty duties of patroness to balls, charities, concerts, and Sunday schools to perform. But I have finished:—the advantages of a house and carriage of your own, the necessity of marriage, I trust you are too well an educated young lady not fully to understand."
"Now, out upon you, Miss Arundel!" said Lady Mandeville—a lady, both of beauty and bel esprit, who sat near her, "to encourage, by smile and silence, so false a painter of our destiny. Do you not see the veiled selfishness of such sophistry? Our said happiness is but the excuse of our exclusion. Whenever I hear a man talking of the advantages of our ill-used sex, I look upon it as the prelude to some new act of authority."
