who, though they receive her, still refuse
her claims of equality. She is not considered as of their
_establishment_; it is but _toleration_ at best.

"At Mrs. Fentham's, I encountered Lady Bab Lawless, a renowned modish
dowager, famous for laying siege to the heart of every distinguished
man, with the united artillery of her own wit and her daughters' beauty.
How many ways there are of being wrong! She was of a character
diametrically opposite to that of Mrs. Fentham. She had the same end in
view, but the means she used to accomplish it were of a bolder strain.
Lady Bab affected no delicacy, she laughed at reserve; she had shaken
hands with decorum.

She held the _noisy_ tenor of her way

with no assumed refinement; and, so far from shielding her designs
behind the mask of decency, she disdained the obsolete expedient. Her
plans succeeded the more infallibly, because her frankness defeated all
suspicion. A man could never divine that such gay and open assaults
could have their foundation in design, and he gave her full credit for
artless simplicity, at the moment she was catching him in her toils. If
she now and then had gone too far, and by a momentary oversight, or
excessive levity had betrayed too much, with infinite address she would
make a crane-neck turn, and fall to discussing, not without ability,
some moral or theological topic. Thus she affected to establish the
character of a woman, thoughtless through wit, indiscreet through
simplicity, but religious on principle.

As there is no part of the appendage to a wife, which I have ever more
dreaded than a Machiavelian mother, I should have been deaf to wit and
blind to beauty, and dead to advances, had their united batteries been
directed against me. But I had not the ambition to aspire to that honor.
I was much too low a mark for her lofty aim. She had a natural antipathy
to every name that could not be found in the red book. She equally
shrunk from untitled opulence and indigent nobility. She knew by
instinct if a younger son was in the room, and by a petrifying look
checked his most distant approaches; while with her powerful spells she
never failed to draw within her magic circle the splendid heir, and
charm him to her purpose.

Highly born herself, she had early been married to a rich man of
inferior rank, for the sake of a large settlement. Her plan was, that
her daughters (who, by the way, are modest and estimable), should find
in the man they ma