ne being of consequence enough to share in her acquaintance; and
she paid back to her inferiors there all the humiliating slights, all the
mortifications, which in London she received from those to whom _she_ was
inferior.

Whether in town or country, it is but justice to acknowledge that in her
own person she was strictly chaste; but in the country she extended that
chastity even to the persons of others; and the young woman who lost her
virtue in the village of Anfield had better have lost her life. Some few
were now and then found hanging or drowned, while no other cause could be
assigned for their despair than an imputation on the discretion of their
character, and dread of the harsh purity of Lady Bendham. She would
remind the parish priest of the punishment allotted for female dishonour,
and by her influence had caused many an unhappy girl to do public penance
in their own or the neighbouring churches.

But this country rigour in town she could dispense withal; and, like
other ladies of virtue, she there visited and received into her house the
acknowledged mistresses of any man in elevated life. It was not,
therefore, the crime, but the rank which the criminal held in society,
that drew down Lady Bendham's vengeance. She even carried her
distinction of classes in female error to such a very nice point that the
adulterous concubine of an elder brother was her most intimate
acquaintance, whilst the less guilty unmarried mistress of the younger
she would not sully her lips to exchange a word with.

Lord and Lady Bendham's birth, education, talents, and propensities,
being much on the same scale of eminence, they would have been a very
happy pair, had not one great misfortune intervened--the lady never bore
her lord a child, while every cottage of the village was crammed with
half-starved children, whose father from week to week, from year to year,
exerted his manly youth, and wasted his strength in vain, to protect them
from hunger; whose mother mourned over her new-born infant as a little
wretch, sent into the world to deprive the rest of what already was too
scanty for them; in the castle, which owned every cottage and all the
surrounding land, and where one single day of feasting would have
nourished for a mouth all the poor inhabitants of the parish, not one
child was given to partake of the plenty. The curse of barrenness was on
the family of the lord of the manor, the curse of fruitfulness upon the
famis