We were shown into her dressing-room, where we found her with a book lying open before her. From a glance which I caught of the large black letter, I saw it was a _Week's Preparation_. This book, it seems, constantly lay open before her from breakfast to dinner, at this season. It was Passion week. But as this is the room in which he sees all her morning visitors, to none of whom is she ever denied, even at this period of retreat, she could only pick up momentary snatches of reading in the short intervals between one person bowing out and another courtesying in. Miss Denham sat by, painting flowers. Sir John asked her ladyship if she would go and dine in a family way with Lady Belfield. She drew up, looked grave, and said with much solemnity, that she should never think of dining abroad at this holy season. Sir John said, "As we have neither cards nor company, I thought you might as well have eaten your chicken in my house as in your own." But though she thought it a sin to dine with a sober family, she made herself amends for the sacrifice, by letting us see that her heart was brimful of the world, pressed down and running over. She indemnified herself for her abstinence from its diversions, by indulging in the only pleasures which she thought compatible with the sanctity of the season, uncharitable gossip, and unbounded calumny. She would not touch a card for the world, but she played over to Sir John the whole game of the preceding Saturday night: told him by what a shameful inattention her partner had lost the odd trick; and that she should not have been beaten after all, had not her adversary, she verily believed, contrived to look over her hand. Sir John seized the only minute in which we were alone, to ask her to add a guinea to a little sum he was collecting for a poor tradesman with a large family, who had been burned out a few nights ago. "His wife," added he, "was your favorite maid Dixon, and both are deserving people." "Ah, poor Dixon! She was always unlucky," replied the lady. "How could they be so careless? Surely they might have put the fire out sooner. They should not have let it get ahead. I wonder people are not more active." "It is too late to inquire about that," said Sir John; "the question now is, not how their loss might have been prevented, but how it may be repaired." "I am really quite sorry," said she, "that I can give you nothing. I have had so many calls lately, that my charity purse is completely exhausted--and that abominable property-tax makes me quite a beggar." While she was speaking, I glanced at the open leaf at, "Charge them that are rich in this world that they be ready to give;" and directing my eye further, it fell on, "Be not deceived. God is not mocked." These were the awful passages which formed a part of her _Preparation_; and this was the practical use she made of them!