to young heiresses before now without
turning them into criminals. With _Constance_ however it seems to have been
different. She had gathered from what she knew of her father's career that
there must be easy ways of making money if you are not too scrupulous, so
she forged his name for a thousand pounds with speculative intent. It was
open to the old man to regard this as an act of filial piety, since it was
an attempt, however crude, to follow the parental tradition; but apparently
forgery had not been one of his foibles and he threatened her with the law
unless she gave up the idea of marrying the secretary, now dismissed from
his service.

Meanwhile she has been carrying on a secret intrigue with that gentleman
(she must have got this from her "Christian" mother), and when her father
comes to know of it he suddenly exhibits an unsuspected gift of
sentimentality ("My baby Con! my baby Con!" he sobs), and, in terror lest
his ewe-lamb's name should be tainted by the breath of scandal, he offers
his late secretary a heavy sum of money to make an honest woman of her. It
sounds a little inconsistent, but of course there may have been a nice
differentiation in the old rogue's mind between a moral and a criminal
offence, in favour of the latter.

As for _Constance_ I have seldom met a less seizable character. If she was
the result of environment there was no visible sign to show how it infected
her. We simply had to take Mr. ESMOND'S word for it. To me the menage
seemed to be of the most respectable. But, of course, you can always
attribute anything to your surroundings. One environment is vicious and so
drives you to vice; another is virtuous with the same effect. _Constance_
might condemn hers, but it never had a chance with a girl like that.

For myself it was not her viciousness that worried me, it was her
vulgarity; and of this she seemed quite unconscious. Her speech abounded in
second-rate colloquialisms. Was it her environment that taught her to say
dreadful things like "Put that in your pipe and smoke it"? The cheap fun
that she got out of a girl-friend who had made it a rule to pray for
her was the kind of thing you would be sorry to find in a common
boarding-school. And are gentlefolk in the habit of asking a man, as
_Constance_ did, how it was that he ever came to get engaged to such a
woman as the one of his choice? In Bayswater it simply isn't done.

At the end of the First Act, after many trivialities and th