s (you will say) no description,
though it may argue me in love with her.

On my honour, no! or only as all others are in love--all the men, I
mean, and even some pro portion of the womankind. The rest agree to
call her "Lady Good-for-Nothing," upon a double rumour, of which one
half is sad truth, and the other (my life on it) false as hell.

They have heard that when Vyell found her she was a serving-girl,
undergoing punishment (a whipping, to be precise) for some trumpery
offence against the Sabbath. Yes, my dear sir, this is true; as it is
true also that Vyell, like a knight-errant of old, offered to share her
punishment, and did indeed share it to the extent of sitting in the
stocks beside her. You'd have thought an honest mind might find food
for compassion in this, and even an excuse to believe the better of
human nature; but it merely scandalises these Puritan tabbies.
They fear Vyell for his wealth and title; and he, despising them, forces
them to visit her.

Now for the falsehood. The clergyman who read the marriage ceremony for
V. somewhere in the backwoods (this, too, was his whim, and they have to
be content with it) is a low-bred trencher-chaplain, by name Silk.
He should have been unfrocked the next week, not for performing a
function apostolically derived, but for spreading a report--I wait to
fasten it on him--that before marriage she was no better than she should
be. I have earned better right than any other man to know Vyell, and I
know it to be calumny. But the wind blows, and the name
"Lady Good-for-Nothing" is a by-breath of it.

Vyell guesses nothing of this. He has a masculine judgment and no small
degree of wit--though 'tis of a hard intellectual kind; but through
misprising his fellow creatures he has come to lack _flair_. His lady,
if she scent a taint on the wind wafted through her routs and
assemblies, no doubt sets it down to breathings upon her humble origin,
or (it may be) even to some leaking gossip of her foregone wrong.
(Women, my dear sir, are brutes to rend a wounded one of the herd.) She
can know nothing of the worse slander.

She moves through her duties as hostess with a pretty well-bred grace,
and a childishness infinitely touching. Yet something more protects
her; a certain common sense, which now and then very nearly achieves
wit. For an instance--But yesterday a certain pompous lady lamented to
her in my hearing (and with intention, as it seemed to me, who am gr