ountenance of Godolphin rose
before her at all times and seasons. The charm of his presence no other
human being could renew. His eloquent and noble features, living,
and glorious with genius and with passion, his sweet deep voice, his
conversation, so rich with mind and knowledge, and the subtle delicacy
with which he applied its graces to some sentiment dedicated to
her, (delicious flattery, of all flatteries the most attractive to a
sensitive and intellectual woman!)--these occurred to her again and
again, and rendered all she saw around her flat, wearisome, insipid. Nor
was this deep-seated and tender weakness the only serpent--if I may use
so confused a metaphor--in the roses of her lot.

And here I invoke the reader's graver attention. The fate of women in
all the more polished circles of society is eminently unnatural and
unhappy. The peasant and his dame are on terms of equality--equality
even of ambition: no career is open to one and shut to the
other;--equality even of hardship, and hardship is employment: no labour
occupies the whole energies of the man, but leaves those of the woman
unemployed. Is this the case with the wives in a higher station?--the
wives of the lawyer, the merchant, the senator, the noble? There, the
men have their occupations; and the women (unless, like poor Fanny,
work-bags and parrots can employ them) none. They are idle. They employ
the imagination and the heart. They fall in love and are wretched; or
they remain virtuous, and are either wearied by an eternal monotony
or they fritter away intellect, mind, character, in the minutest
frivolities--frivolities being their only refuge from stagnation. Yes!
there is one very curious curse for the sex which men don't consider!
Once married, the more aspiring of them have no real scope for ambition:
the ambition gnaws away their content, and never find elsewhere
wherewithal to feed on.

This was Constance's especial misfortune. Her lofty, and restless, and
soaring spirit pined for a sphere of action, and ballrooms and boudoirs
met it on every side. One hope she did indeed cherish; that hope was the
source of her intriguings and schemes, of her care for seeming trifles,
the waste of her energies on seeming frivolities. This hope, this
object, was to diminish--to crush, not only the party which had forsaken
her father, but the power of that order to which she belonged herself;
which she had entered only to humble. But this hope was a distant