cheerfulness of Norville Abbey, and the vivacity and kindness of Lady Mandeville, compared with the coldness, the talking-at-you style of conversation in which her aunt's dislike found its narrow and acrid channel, was too much to be borne. Strange, that one whose opinion we neither respect nor admit should yet have power to wound!—not stranger, though, than that it should have power to please. One may live to be indifferent to everything but opinion. We may reject friendship which has often deceived us; renounce love, whose belief once found false, leaves us atheists of the heart; we may turn from pleasures which have palled—from employments which have become wearisome: but the opinion of our kind, whether for good or for evil, still retains its hold; that once broken, every social and moral tie is broken too—the prisoner then may go to his solitary cell—the anchorite to his hermitage—the last link with life and society is rent in twain.
Emily was pained, more than she would have admitted, by the various signs of dress and decoration scattered around; but the worst was as yet unseen. Passing along the gallery, there was one door open—one door which she never saw without a shudder—one door which she
