atisfy country ladies.
Bells rang to meals and to prayers. The young ladies took exercise on
the pianoforte every morning after breakfast, Rebecca giving them the
benefit of her instruction. Then they put on thick shoes and walked in
the park or shrubberies, or beyond the palings into the village,
descending upon the cottages, with Lady Southdown's medicine and tracts
for the sick people there. Lady Southdown drove out in a pony-chaise,
when Rebecca would take her place by the Dowager's side and listen to
her solemn talk with the utmost interest. She sang Handel and Haydn to
the family of evenings, and engaged in a large piece of worsted work,
as if she had been born to the business and as if this kind of life was
to continue with her until she should sink to the grave in a polite old
age, leaving regrets and a great quantity of consols behind her--as if
there were not cares and duns, schemes, shifts, and poverty waiting
outside the park gates, to pounce upon her when she issued into the
world again.

"It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife," Rebecca thought.
"I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year. I
could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on the wall.
I could water plants in a green-house and pick off dead leaves from the
geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order
half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I shouldn't miss it much,
out of five thousand a year. I could even drive out ten miles to dine
at a neighbour's, and dress in the fashions of the year before last. I
could go to church and keep awake in the great family pew, or go to
sleep behind the curtains, with my veil down, if I only had practice.
I could pay everybody, if I had but the money. This is what the
conjurors here pride themselves upon doing. They look down with pity
upon us miserable sinners who have none. They think themselves
generous if they give our children a five-pound note, and us
contemptible if we are without one." And who knows but Rebecca was
right in her speculations--and that it was only a question of money and
fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? If
you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than
his neighbour? A comfortable career of prosperity, if it does not make
people honest, at least keeps them so. An alderman coming from a
turtle feast will not step out of his carnage to steal a leg of m