? My face is my fortune. Who'll
come?--buy, buy, buy! I cannot toil, neither can I spin, but I can play
twenty-three games on the cards. I can dance the last dance, I can hunt
the stag, and I think I could shoot flying. I can talk as wicked as any
woman of my years, and know enough stories to amuse a sulky husband for
at least one thousand and one nights. I have a pretty taste for dress,
diamonds, gambling, and old China. I love sugar-plums, Malines lace
(that you brought me, cousin, is very pretty), the opera, and everything
that is useless and costly. I have got a monkey and a little
black boy--Pompey, sir, go and give a dish of chocolate to Colonel
Graveairs,--and a parrot and a spaniel, and I must have a husband.
Cupid, you hear?"

"Iss, Missis!" says Pompey, a little grinning negro Lord Peterborrow
gave her, with a bird of Paradise in his turbant, and a collar with his
mistress's name on it.

"Iss, Missis!" says Beatrix, imitating the child. "And if husband not
come, Pompey must go fetch one."

And Pompey went away grinning with his chocolate tray as Miss Beatrix
ran up to her mother and ended her sally of mischief in her common way,
with a kiss--no wonder that upon paying such a penalty her fond judge
pardoned her.

When Mr. Esmond came home, his health was still shattered; and he took a
lodging near to his mistresses, at Kensington, glad enough to be served
by them, and to see them day after day. He was enabled to see a little
company--and of the sort he liked best. Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison both
did him the honor to visit him; and drank many a glass of good claret
at his lodging, whilst their entertainer, through his wound, was kept to
diet drink and gruel. These gentlemen were Whigs, and great admirers of
my Lord Duke of Marlborough; and Esmond was entirely of the other party.
But their different views of politics did not prevent the gentlemen from
agreeing in private, nor from allowing, on one evening when Esmond's
kind old patron, Lieutenant-General Webb, with a stick and a crutch,
hobbled up to the Colonel's lodging (which was prettily situate at
Knightsbridge, between London and Kensington, and looking over
the Gardens), that the Lieutenant-General was a noble and gallant
soldier--and even that he had been hardly used in the Wynendael affair.
He took his revenge in talk, that must be confessed; and if Mr. Addison
had had a mind to write a poem about Wynendael, he might have heard from
the commander'