pictured with its
benign aspect, it would have been feared but by few, and many, many would
welcome it with gladness.

All the care of Agnes to please, her fear of offending, her toilsome
days, her patience, her submission, could not prevail on her she served
to retain her one hour after, by chance, she had heard "that she was the
mother of a child; that she wished it should be kept a secret; and that
she stole out now and then to visit him."

Agnes, with swimming eyes and an almost breaking heart, left a
place--where to have lived one hour would have plunged any fine lady in
the deepest grief.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Agnes was driven from service to service--her deficiency in the knowledge
of a mere drudge, or her lost character, pursued her wherever she went--at
length, becoming wholly destitute, she gladly accepted a place where the
latter misfortune was not of the least impediment.

In one of these habitations, where continual misery is dressed in
continual smiles; where extreme of poverty is concealed by extreme of
finery; where wine dispenses mirth only by dispensing forgetfulness; and
where female beauty is so cheap, so complying, that, while it inveigles,
it disgusts the man of pleasure: in one of those houses, to attend upon
its wretched inhabitants, Agnes was hired. Her feelings of rectitude
submitted to those of hunger; her principles of virtue (which the loss of
virtue had not destroyed) received a shock when she engaged to be the
abettor of vice, from which her delicacy, morality, and religion shrunk;
but persons of honour and of reputation would not employ her: was she
then to perish? That, perhaps, was easy to resolve; but she had a child
to leave behind! a child, from whom to part for a day was a torment. Yet,
before she submitted to a situation which filled her mind with a kind of
loathing horror, often she paced up and down the street in which William
lived, looked wistfully at his house, and sometimes, lost to all her
finer feelings of independent pride, thought of sending a short petition
to him; but, at the idea of a repulse, and of that frowning brow which
she knew William _could_ dart on her petitions, she preferred death, or
the most degrading life, to the trial.

It was long since that misfortune and dishonour had made her callous to
the good or ill opinion of all the world, except _his_; and the fear of
drawing upon her his increased contempt was still, at the crisis of
applying, so