w,--and knew, therefore, that with her limited income she must
maintain not only herself and daughter, but also the baronet. She did
not know, however, the amount of the baronet's obligations;--nor,
indeed, did he, or any one else. A baronet, holding a commission in
the Guards, and known to have had a fortune left him by his father,
may go very far in getting into debt; and Sir Felix had made full use
of all his privileges. His life had been in every way bad. He had
become a burden on his mother so heavy,--and on his sister also,--that
their life had become one of unavoidable embarrassments. But not for a
moment, had either of them ever quarrelled with him. Henrietta had
been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice
might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was
expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had
come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the
feeling of any grievance. She lamented her brother's evil conduct as
it affected him, but she pardoned it altogether as it affected
herself. That all her interests in life should be made subservient to
him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts
were discontinued, and her moderate expenses curtailed, because he,
having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that
was his mother's, she never complained. Henrietta had been taught to
think that men in that rank of life in which she had been born always
did eat up everything.

The mother's feeling was less noble.--or perhaps, it might better be
said, more open to censure. The boy, who had been beautiful as a star,
had ever been the cynosure of her eyes, the one thing on which her
heart had riveted itself. Even during the career of his folly she had
hardly ventured to say a word to him with the purport of stopping him
on his road to ruin. In everything she had spoilt him as a boy, and in
everything she still spoilt him as a man. She was almost proud of his
vices, and had taken delight in hearing of doings which if not vicious
of themselves had been ruinous from their extravagance. She had so
indulged him that even in her own presence he was never ashamed of his
own selfishness or apparently conscious of the injustice which he did
to others.

From all this it had come to pass that that dabbling in literature
which had been commenced partly perhaps from a sense of pleasure in
the work, partly as a passp