ABSTRACT
Mrs. Morley now followed the attendant of the bed-chamber to lady Eldercourt’s dressing-room, where she found her new patroness recently risen, and sitting at her toilette. Lady Eldercourt was neither lovely nor juvenile: but a flattering delusion, which is often the replenishing glow of life’s waning lustre, frequently told her she was both. Proud she certainly was: but her understanding was circumscribed and her education limited. Lady Eldercourt, with high rank and high opinions, at least as far as they towered above the less fortunate, was not born noble; neither did she, by acting nobly, supply the deficiency which Fortune had, till her youth was past, forgotten to remedy.
