Geoffery here interrupted the discussion by rising to take his departure, pleading the ball at his aunt's, which he must attend, while Sir William Orm, finding there would be no chance of renewing the whist party, inveigled away the Marquis to the hazard-table. Mr. Salter, thus left to himself, was soon fast asleep in his chair; and his usual nap being prolonged by his unusual potations, it was a couple of hours before he found his way into the drawing-room. The disappointment of his daughters, on his making his appearance alone, may be imagined, when it is duly considered that they had waited tea, though we cannot say patiently, till near one o'clock in the morning for the gentlemen, of whose early retreat they were not aware. So much for feeding illbred men of fashion, in the hope of securing in return what they have not to give--their politeness. After, therefore, expressing warmly their disapprobation of such rudeness, the Misses Salter had nothing for it but to retire to rest, venting on each other, 'till sleep closed their lips, the aggregate of spleen collected throughout the day from so many fruitful sources. Yet here were people whose more than common prosperity might have brought with it more than common happiness in their own line, had not silly ambition and idle vanity poisoned every fountain of attainable enjoyment, and created an inconvenient thirst for the springs of a land of which they were never likely to become naturalized citizens. The Misses Salter had always heard their poor father say, that he had spared no expense in their education; they knew that they possessed accomplishments, and prided themselves on remembering what they had been made to read at school. But they knew not, for it came not within their sphere to know, that there is an education of early habits effecting the minutiæ of outward bearing, and acquired it would seem, by the unconscious mimicry of infancy, the stamp of which no after-school discipline can yet either erase or bestow; and still less were they capable of comprehending, that there is a further education of refining sympathies and ennobling sentiments which, while as children of Adam we all share one first nature, bestows, in combination with that already named of early habits, a sort of second nature, on the privileged few, who from generation to generation have been reared, like exotics, amid the beautiful and beautifying blossoms of delicacy and feeling, sheltered from the rough winds of coarseness, the blighting atmosphere of necessity, and the cold ungenial climate of that almost justifiable selfishness unavoidably learned by those who have not only their own, but their family's imperious wants to supply by their individual anxious exertions.