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was become the principal object with the fastidious Miss Arbe, and heard this wish of intimacy, she was utterly confounded that another person of consequence should countenance, and through her means, this itinerant Incognita. Yet to obviate the mischief by an avowal similar to that which she had been forced to make to Mrs. Howel, she thought an insupportable degradation; and Miss Arbe, with the politest declarations that she should call again the next day, purposely to entitle herself to a visit in return from Miss Ellis, was already gone, before Mrs. Maple had sufficiently recovered from her confusion, to devise any impediment to the proposal.
All then that occurred to her, was her usually violent, but short measure, of sending Ellis suddenly from the house, and excusing her disappearance, by asserting that her own friends had summoned her away: for Mrs. Maple, like at least half the world, though delicate with respect to her character for truth in
