What can grow out of such a life, that is really wholesome and good? Many, many residents in London, escape this mischief. They have broken down the wall of separation which used to hide the very existence of want and misery and sin from the happier and the better; and the obscure dwellings of the London poor have their visiting angels, as well as those in the country. But a great many families still neglect this weighty duty, and live without thought of such things.
Mrs. Winstanley had led the regular party-going London life for the last sixteen or seventeen years. She was beginning to get rather tired of it, when the new excitement arose of having to "bring out" her daughters.
This bringing out of her daughters became an excuse for all kinds of amusing changes and improvements. Her receiving-rooms had to be newly furnished, a new open carriage to be bought, the Queen's drawing-rooms to be attended with more assiduity than ever.
The girls were two lovely creatures; they seemed to excuse, if any thing could, the expenses thus incurred on their behalf. So said the mother, and so thought the father. The love he felt for his daughters was perhaps the only tender feeling he had ever experienced in his life; for, in general, he might be said to love nothing, not even himself.
It might have been the dawn of a better life, this well-spring of pure affections, could he have worthily indulged them. But neither his own nor his wife's habits admitted of that.
Mrs. Winstanley would have thought it a disgrace if she had been one single evening disengaged whilst they were in London. Even in the dead winter she managed to keep up the ball; what with little parties and concerts, the opera, the French plays, and so forth, she contrived to escape the horror of a domestic evening. As for Mr. Winstanley, he seldom or never dined at home; except when there was a dinner-party. He spent his evenings at his clubs, engaged—he too well knew how.
The two girls presented a striking contrast to each other. Clementina was fair and delicate, with soft hair, and those tender blue eyes, which to me are the most charming of all eyes. Ella was a noble creature; a figure and form the most perfect that I ever beheld—features of matchless symmetry—eyes dark, large, and lustrous—hair in floods of rich brown waves—a hand that was a model, from which statuaries contested to be allowed to copy—and a spirit, energy, and feeling in her gestures and countenance, that won your heart before you were aware.
It was upon her that Julian Winstanley doted. The other girl he thought, and called, a sweet girl, but his Ella was his darling. Nothing was too good for Ella; nothing was to be spared that could please or adorn Ella. To ride with her in the Park; to visit the box where she sat at the opera; sometimes in a party to hear her sing; seemed to give him a new pleasure.
Yet there was nothing in all this, unhappily, to rouse him to a better life; to break the chain of evil habits in which he was involved. Ella was a child of this world; an impetuous, proud, haughty beauty; a contemptuous disregarder of the weak, the wanting, and, above all, the low, or the ugly;—living for the day, as her father lived for the day—she for the day of vanity and pleasure; he for the day of vanity and sin. There was that difference, indeed, and it was a vast one; but he did not feel it.