or too cool, just as they fancy you a somebody or a nobody-often sadly out in their calculations, and always offending and atoning, courting and repelling-climbing and stumbling by turns! Poor Mrs. Orde!" Mrs. Colonel Orde," as she had the very bad taste to write, or rather print herself on her cards-was a pretty, and clever, and would have been a charming woman had she belonged to any other class, and had she cultivated any other taste, than for titles and fine people!

She loved her daughters with an affection, at once lively and intense, and would have made any sacrifice to their happiness, but that of this "ruling passion" of her heart. It had been irritated into action, and increased to morbidity, by what she considered the brilliant marriages of her nieces, the "Beauchamp girls," as she always slightingly called them, who, with less beauty, less fortune, and fewer accomplishments than her own Rosalie and Jeannetta possessed, had by means of a good introduction, and a bad ambition, married, the one an old, decrepit, dissipated peer, the other an Italian marquis, attached to an embassy, with nothing real about him but his enormous appetite, his insolent and public inconstancy, his furious passions, and his perfectly artistic talent in making up a bald, sallow, savage, dark-looking skeleton, into a bland, graceful, blooming, elegant cavalier.

All that Nature had done towards this result was the bestowing on him a very tall, majestic, large-boned frame, a pair of lustrous black eyes, and a showy nose. Art supplied a ventilating perruque, on which both hair and head were so perfect, the imposition was not only never detected, but never even suspected. Art dyed, with corresponding glossy black, the grisly eye-brows, moustaches, and whiskers, tinted the cheeks and lips, supplied two dazzling rows of pearly teeth, rounded to perfection the hollowed, lanky form, and sent forth be-furred, be-braided, covered with orders, and fragrant of heliotrope, the Marchese di Castelnuovo-the admired of all admirers, the envied of the men, the courted of the women, and who, two hours before he left the temple of art (his dressing-room), was a squalid, shrunken wreckbald, toothless, old, and ugly!

Still he was the Marquis de Castelnuovo, attaché to one embassy, and expecting to be himself an ambassador, received at court, and fêted everywhere; and such as he was, in reality, some thirty years her senior, Louisa Beauchamp, at eighteen, fell desperately in love with him, bestowed herself and her ten thousand pounds upon him, and was considered by all her English friends to have made a brilliant match, almost equal in splendour to that of her sister Augusta, whose husband, though an English peer, had none of the personal advantages of the marquis, whose bald head glistened like a new-born mushroom; whose nose and chin approximated sadly; who cared more for comfort than for show; whose corpulence no belt restrained; who never tried to please, but only to be pleased-made love to every pretty woman, because it amused him to do so, and married, from a mere freak, and because a nephew, whom he envied and disliked, admired the blooming Augusta, and asked her to "polk" with him; and the artful young husbandhunter having coldly declined, whispered into the ear of the old beau, "Does Captain Trevanion not know how much I prefer sitting by you, to dancing with him? His conversation after yours is like luke-warm bucellas after iced champagne."

The Earl of Tunbridge looked into the softly animated face of Miss Beauchamp. She gazed tenderly at him— "I'll marry, I'll have an heir yet, and cut out that puppy," he thought. He proposed, was joyfully accepted, and, at the end of a month, Augusta became Countess of Tunbridge.

Throw the bridal veil over both those weddings. It is not yet time to lift it, and to ask, what lies beyond those piles of silver favours, orange wreaths, gay trousseaux, glittering gems, and white kid gloves? At present, all we know is, that envy whitened the very lips that tried to smile congratulation; that every letter of every female friend or foe of the Beauchamps was full of nothing but these splendid matches; that Lady Beauchamp was in a fever of ecstasy, though left alone in her glory, for the marquis took his bride at once to his palazzo at Florence, and the Earl of Tunbridge carried his countess and his chronic rheumatism to Baden-Baden.

And of all whose heads these nuptials filled with schemes; of all whose hearts, in consequence, beat high with emulation, none, perhaps, surpassed the aunt of the brides, whose daughters, Rosalie and Jeannetta, had officiated among the bridesmaids, and whose appearance had elicited so much admiration, that their mother resolved to accelerate, by one year, the projected and long-wished-for season of their introduction.

CHAPTER II.

THE MOTHER AND DAUGHTERS, AND THE OLD
SCOTCH AUNT.

MRS. ORDE had a very handsome jointure, and her daughters six thousand pounds a-piece in actual possession, as much more on their attaining their majority, and a reversionary interest in a thousand a-year, dependent on their mother's death, but which, as she was of a good constitution and in the prime of life, it seemed probable would not very soon be theirs. Of this interest, the girls knew nothing, and they loved their mother so tenderly, that they would have hated the bare idea of any benefit to be purchased by her loss.

It was at the close of the season that the brilliant weddings of the "Beauchamp girls" had taken place, and Mrs. Orde having determined to introduce her own daughters next spring in London, resolved to pass the interval in improving to the utmost their personal and mental attractions. She was quite of Dr. Johnson's opinion, that "though there may be health without beauty, there is no beauty without health," and therefore she resolved to spend the autumn and the winter, which were to precede "the season in town," in that healthiest of all watering places, Brighton.

Mrs. Orde herself was of Scotch descent, a Macpherson by name, and though born and bred in England she had inherited much of the beauty, something of the accent, and many of the prejudices and peculiarities which distinguish the daughters of Scotia. There is generally in

the true Scotch character, a sort of simple shrewdness (or shrewd simplicity), a quaint mixture of pride and humility, of gentleness and daring, of warmth of heart and reserve of manner, which make it, to our minds, as original as it is fascinating. All these peculiarities were, however, much more prominently marked in the character of Miss Jenny Macpherson, an old Scotch aunt of Mrs. Orde's, who, having outlived all her other relatives, left "Bonnie Glasgow" where she was, as she said, the "centre of a circle!" (of old Scotch spinsters by the way) "to gie to her ain niece, and her dear grandnieces, the benefit o' her experience, and o' her countenance."

Miss Jenny Macpherson, far too proud to be indebted to any one, insisted on making a fair remuneration for her board, lodging, and an occasional" cast in the corrige." She was quick, kind, proud, very irascible, vain of her by-gone charms-of some pretensions to literary taste (albeit old-fashioned in her notions), and gloriously proud of her own sex.

Looking upon woman as the best, and therefore the most finished work of the creation, warmly sympathizing with the Flora M'Ivors, the Helen M'Gregors of her land, and upholding independence of character and mental superiority throughout the female world; pitying the gentle, and despising the meek among her sex; dignified enough, when any flattery was addressed to herself personally, but very accessible to any praise, however hyperbolical and enthusiastic, when her sex was its object. In proportion to her habit of over-rating woman, was that of under-rating man, whose place in the creation she attributed to brute force, whose weaknesses she delighted in pointing out, whose attentions she professed always to have despised, and about whom she generally concluded by saying "Indeed, niece Orde, had these na been my sentiments fra' early girlhood, and hod I, amang hosts o' admeerers, found ain I could conscientiously vow to 'love, honour, and obey,' I'd noo be, na a hale, harty, independent speenster, wi' a wull o' my ain, and a gude name o' my ain, but some puir, sickly, worn-out wife of some tyrant mon, wi' disobedient sons to proveede for, and helpless dochters to marry. I'd hae na' a penny at my ain command, nor git ain, nor a bill paid,

withot a grudge and a grunt, and I'd na' hae the pride o' writing mysel' Jenny Macpherson to the end, or of kenning that that spotless name will gang wi' me to the grave, and brighten up the coffin lid o' the last o' her

race.'

To these and similar remarks, Mrs. Orde, a woman of the world, who had been many years a wife, without being a slave, sometimes replied with a strength of argument which aroused all the energies of the old Scotch spinster, and often put her into a violent passion; but more frequently she only smiled at what she considered an old maid's spite against mankind, and tried to counteract the influence of such rebellious sentiments by pointing out to her daughters how easily woman

"Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,

And has her humour most, when she obeys."

This common policy suited well enough the gentle, temporizing nature of pretty Rosalie Orde, who inherited her mother's fair hair, blue eyes, soft features and feminine nature (we use feminine in the common acceptation of the term); but Jeannetta was cast in a different mould; frank, daring, romantic, true to the heart's core, and proud as Miss Jenny Macpherson herself, but of a pride less tinged with caricature-Jeannetta scorned the policy which bids her sex to "stoop to conquer," which upholds cunning as woman's best resource, and makes manœuvring not only a work of necessity, but a labour of love. She did not share her aunt's absurd and crotchety notions of woman's superiority and man's insignificance; but she insisted on equality, possibly because her frank nature, proud spirit, and brave heart convinced her that she, individually, at least had, like Elizabeth, the heart of a king, and felt strong in her own internal conviction that Seneca erred in believing there is a sex in the soul.

Her beauty, inherited from her father (the brave Colonel Orde, whose bones whitened on a foreign soil), was of the Flora M'Ivor school, and perfect of its kind, and the few who had been fortunate enough to see the forthcoming beauties, declared that neither Minna and Brenda, nor any other brunette and blonde, of poetry or romance, could more sweetly represent "Night and Morning," than did Rosalie and Jeannetta Orde.