arise all Helen's troubles; her
husband, General Clarendon, who held

All fraud and cunning in disdain,
A friend to truth, in speech and action plain;

the malicious Lady Beatrice and her silly, pretty sister; while Horace
Churchill, the man about town, who is more modern in tone than Miss
Edgeworth's earlier portraits of the same class, loses nothing by
comparison with them. Despite his restless egotism, his spitefulness,
his generally unpleasant character, he is a gentleman in all outside
seeming, the old-fashioned, perfect tone of high breeding marks him, and
he is even capable of a certain generosity that seems more an inherited
instinct than a part of his individual nature. Esther, the general's
sister, is one of the quaintest and most delightful characters in the
book, drawn with kindliness and humor--a girl with the power of a noble
woman hidden under the crust of a gruff and abrupt exterior, which
springs half from shyness, half from a defiant love of truth and hatred
of conventional chains. The purpose of _Helen_ is to show how much the
sufferings and dissensions of social life arise from the prevailing
digressions from truth, often due in the first instance to small society
politenesses. Its key-note lies in the ejaculation of Miss Clarendon: "I
wish that word _fib_ was out of the English language, and _white lie_
drummed out after it. Things by their right names, and we should all do
much better. Truth must be told, whether agreeable or not." Most
perfectly and naturally is the imbroglio brought to pass, the
entanglement caused by the love-letters, the way in which every fresh
deceit on the part of Cecilia, meant to be harmless, tells in her
husband's mind against the friend behind whom she is basely hiding her
own fault. With Cecilia, whose failings were of the kind with which Miss
Edgeworth had least mercy, she is singularly gentle. For once she lets
us pity the offender while we condemn the crime. Life had probably
taught her that consequences are so surely unpitying that she no longer
felt the need to insist on this, as she had done in former years, when
she would probably have sketched for us the whole course of Cecilia's
punishment, whose nature she now only indicates. Helen is a charming
heroine; no wax doll of impossible perfection, but a very woman, wayward
and weak sometimes, but true, high-spirited, impulsively generous,
staunch in her friendship and her love, with deep and passionat