niture, a carriage
and horses, dresses and jewels, which latter, if not quite real,
should be manufactured of the best sham substitute known. Soon after
her brilliant marriage with Mr. Dobbs Broughton, she had discovered
that the carriage and horses, and the sham jewels, did not lift her
so completely into a terrestrial paradise as she had taught herself
to expect that they would do. Her brilliant drawing-room, with Dobbs
Broughton for a companion, was not an elysium. But though she had
found out early in her married life that something was still wanting
to her, she had by no means confessed to herself that the carriage
and horses and sham jewels were bad, and it can hardly be said that
she had repented. She had endeavoured to patch up matters with a
little romance, and then had fallen upon Conway Dalrymple,--meaning
no harm. Indeed, love with her, as it never could have meant much
good, was not likely to mean much harm. That somebody should pretend
to love her, to which pretence she might reply by a pretence of
friendship,--this was the little excitement which she craved, and by
which she had once flattered herself that something of an elysium
might yet be created for her. Mr. Dobbs Broughton had unreasonably
expressed a dislike to this innocent amusement,--very unreasonably,
knowing, as he ought to have known, that he himself did so very
little towards providing the necessary elysium by any qualities of
his own. For a few weeks this interference from her husband had
enhanced the amusement, giving an additional excitement to the game.
She felt herself to be a woman misunderstood and ill-used; and to
some women there is nothing so charming as a little mild ill-usage,
which does not interfere with their creature comforts, with their
clothes, or their carriage, or their sham jewels; but suffices to
afford them the indulgence of a grievance. Of late, however, Mr. Dobbs
Broughton had become a little too rough in his language, and things
had gone uncomfortably. She suspected that Conway Dalrymple was not
the only cause of all this. She had an idea that Mr. Musselboro and
Mrs. Van Siever had it in their power to make themselves unpleasant,
and that they were exercising this power. Of his business in the
City her husband never spoke to her, nor she to him. Her own fortune
had been very small, some couple of thousand pounds or so, and she
conceived that she had no pretext on which she could, unasked,
interrogate him about his m