the housekeeper's room
at the Park; and her cards in French and English, stating that she
received the newest fashions from Paris from her correspondent Madame
Victorine, and that she was in the custom of making court and ball
dresses for the nobility and gentry of the shire, were in the possession
of Lady Clavering and Miss Amory, and favourably received, as she was
happy to hear, by those ladies.

Mrs. Bonner, Lady Clavering's lady, became soon a great frequenter of
Madame Fribsby's drawing-room, and partook of many entertainments at the
milliner's expense. A meal of green tea, scandal, hot Sally-Lunn cakes,
and a little novel reading, were always at the service of Mrs. Bonner,
whenever she was free to pass an evening in the town. And she found
much more time for these pleasures than her junior officer, Miss Amory's
maid, who seldom could be spared for a holiday, and was worked as hard
as any factory-girl by that inexorable little Muse, her mistress.

The Muse loved to be dressed becomingly, and, having a lively fancy and
a poetic desire for change, was for altering her attire every day.
Her maid having a taste in dressmaking--to which art she had been an
apprentice at Paris, before she entered into Miss Blanche's service
there--was kept from morning till night altering and remodelling Miss
Amory's habiliments; and rose very early and went to bed very late, in
obedience to the untiring caprices of her little taskmistress. The
girl was of respectable English parents. There are many of our people,
colonists of Paris, who have seen better days, who are not quite ruined,
who do not quite live upon charity, and yet cannot get on without it;
and as her father was a cripple incapable of work, and her return home
would only increase the burthen and add to the misery of the family,
poor Pincott was fain to stay where she could maintain herself, and
spare a little relief to her parents.

Our Muse, with the candour which distinguished her, never failed to
remind her attendant of the real state of matters. "I should send you
away, Pincott, for you are a great deal too weak, and your eyes are
failing you, and you are always crying and snivelling and wanting the
doctor; but I wish that your parents at home should be supported, and I
go on enduring you for their sake, mind," the dear Blanche would say to
her timid little attendant. Or, "Pincott, your wretched appearance and
slavish manner, and red eyes, positively give me the mig