Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation to a
dreadful public case and a melancholy private, we have a pleased sense of
entry into the world's ideal.

At the same time, we protest our unworthiness. Acknowledgeing that they
were not purely spotless, these ladies genuinely took the tiny fly-spot
for a spur to purification; and they viewed it as a patch to raise in
relief their goodness. They gazed on it, saw themselves in it, and veiled
it: warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated Tempter.

To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their reaping. Uneasy
consciences could not have slept. The sleeping served for proof of an
accurate reckoning and an expungeing of the day's debits. They differed
in opinion now and then, as we see companion waves of the river, blown by
a gust, roll a shadow between them; and almost equally transient were
their differences with a world that they condemned when they could not
feel they (as an embodiment of their principles) were leading it. The
English world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled pathway of
virtue; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel,
often dangerously smooth, to divide: but it is not perverted for long;
and the English Funds are always constant and a tower. Would they be
suffered to be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant?

Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney ladies. Hearing of the
journey to them and the purport of it, he said, with the mask upon glee:
'Then Victor has met his match!' Nataly had sent for him to dine with her
in Victor's absence: she was far from grieved, as to the result, by his
assurance to her, that Victor had not a chance. Colney thought so. 'Just
like him! to be off gaily to try and overcome or come over the greatest
power in England.' They were England herself; the squat old woman she has
become by reason of her overlapping numbers of the comfortable
fund-holder annuitants: a vast body of passives and negatives, living by
precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be
righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. Them he
branded, as hypocritical materialists, and the country for pride in her
sweetmeat plethora of them:--mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offence
to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary
iteration of the litany of sinfulness. He was near a truth; and he had
the heat of it on him.

Satirists