the French language. He attended her to plays and concerts
three or four times a week; and when our hero thought her sufficiently
accustomed to the sight of great company, he squired her in person to
a public assembly, and danced with her among all the gay ladies of
fashion; not but that there was still an evident air of rusticity and
awkwardness in her demeanour, which was interpreted into an agreeable
wildness of spirit, superior to the forms of common breeding. He
afterwards found means to make her acquainted with some distinguished
patterns of her own sex, by whom she was admitted into the most elegant
parties, and continued to make good her pretensions to gentility, with
great circumspection. But one evening, being at cards with a certain
lady whom she detected in the very fact of unfair conveyance, she taxed
her roundly with the fraud, and brought upon herself such a torrent of
sarcastic reproof, as overbore all her maxims of caution, and burst
open the floodgates of her own natural repartee, twanged off with the
appellation of b-- and w--, which she repeated with great vehemence, in
an attitude of manual defiance, to the terror of her antagonist, and
the astonishment of all present; nay, to such an unguarded pitch was she
provoked, that, starting up, she snapped her fingers, in testimony of
disdain, and, as she quitted the room, applied her hand to that part
which was the last of her that disappeared, inviting the company to kiss
it by one of its coarsest denominations.

Peregrine was a little disconcerted at this oversight in her behaviour,
which, by the demon of intelligence, was in a moment conveyed to all the
private companies in town; so that she was absolutely excluded from all
polite communication, and Peregrine, for the present, disgraced among
the modest part of his female acquaintance, many of whom not only
forbade him their houses, on account of the impudent insult he had
committed upon their honour, as well as understanding, in palming a
common trull upon them, as a young lady of birth and education; but
also aspersed his family, by affirming that she was actually his own
cousin-german, whom he had precipitately raised from the most abject
state of humility and contempt. In revenge for this calumny, our young
gentleman explained the whole mystery of her promotion, together with
the motives that induced him to bring her into the fashionable world;
and repeated among his companions the extravagant encomi