creation.
Sometimes they are unqualified to gain a maintenance, educated as is
called, genteelly, or in other words idly, they are ignorant of every
thing that might give them superior abilities to the lower rank of
people, and their birth renders them less acceptable servants to many,
who have not generosity enough to treat them as they ought, and yet do
not choose while they are acting the mistress, perhaps too haughtily, to
feel the secret reproaches of their own hearts. Possibly pride may still
oftener reduce these indigent gentlewomen into this wretched state of
dependence, and therefore the world is less inclined to pity them; but
my friends see human weakness in another light.

'They imagine themselves too far from perfection to have any title to
expect it in others, and think that there are none in whom pride is so
excusable as in the poor, for if there is the smallest spark of it in
their compositions, and who is entirely free from it, the frequent
neglects and indignities they meet with must keep it continually alive.
If we are despised for casual deficiencies, we naturally seek in
ourselves for some merit, to restore us to that dignity in our own eyes
which those humiliating mortifications would otherwise debase. Thus we
learn to set too great a value on what we still possess, whether
advantages of birth, education, or natural talents; any thing will serve
for a resource to mortified pride; and as every thing grows by
opposition and persecution, we cannot wonder if the opinion of ourselves
increases by the same means.

'To persons in this way of thinking, the pride which reduces many to be,
what is called with too little humanity, toad-eaters, does not render
them unworthy of compassion. Therefore for the relief of this race they
bought that large mansion.

'They drew up several regulations, to secure the peace and good order of
the society they designed to form, and sending a copy of it to all their
acquaintance, told them that any gentleman's daughter, whose character
was unblemished, might, if she desired it, on those terms be received
into that society.'

I begged, if it was not too much trouble, to know what the regulations
were.

'The first rule,' continued Mrs Maynard, 'was that whoever chose to take
the benefit of this asylum, for such I may justly call it, should
deposit in the hands of a person appointed for that purpose, whatever
fortune she was mistress of, the security being approved by he