lth,
the distinction she panted for, she was still anxious to mount higher?
Was it possible that wealth, station, general admiration, and the
devoted affection of a tender husband did not satisfy the humbly-born
beauty of an obscure English village? Again Helen spoke; she told how
she had at last succeeded in rousing her husband to exertion--how,
with an art worthy a better cause, she had persuaded him that his
country demanded his assistance--how he had been led almost to believe
that the safety of England was in the hands of the freeholders of
L----; and then she pictured her own triumph, as the wife of the
successful candidate, over the woman who had called her a _parvenue_.
"And, after all," murmured poor Rose, "and after all, dear Helen, you
are really unhappy."

"Miserable!" was the reply--"no creature was ever so perfectly
miserable as I am! The one drop of poison has poisoned the whole cup.
What to me was all this grandeur, when I felt that _that_ woman looked
down upon me, and induced others to do the same; that though I was
with them, I was not of them; and all through her means. Ivers could
not understand my feeling; and, besides, I dare not let him know
what had been said by one of his own clique, lest _he should become
inoculated by the same feeling_."

"Another fruit," thought Rose Dillon, "of the evil which attends
unequal marriages."

"But _my_ triumph will come!" she repeated; "Ivers must carry all
before him; and _who knows what may follow_?"

"Still unsatisfied!" thought Rose, as she wandered through the
splendid rooms and inhaled the perfume of the most expensive exotics,
and gazed upon beautiful pictures, and listened to the roll of
carriages, and heard the kind fond voice of Helen's devoted husband
urging the physician, who made his daily calls, to pay his wife the
greatest attention. "Still unsatisfied!" she repeated; and then she
thought of one of Edward's homely but wise proverbs--"All is not
gold that glitters;" and she thought how quite as beautiful, and
more varied by the rich variety of nature, was the prospect from
the parlour-window of the farm-house, that was to be her own. "And
woodbine, roses, and mignonette breathe as sweet odours as exotics,
and belong of right to the cottages of England. Ah!" continued the
right-minded girl, "better is a little and content therewith, than all
the riches of wealth and art without it. If her ambition had even a
_great_ object I could forgive her;