In this seminary she was unfortunately inoculated with a virus, that totally diseased a heart nature had intended for better purposes--namely, an aching desire after fashionable life, which led her to caricature those airs of _ton_ which she had not _tact_ to imitate. The eye that is always turned upwards must be blinded by the brightness of a sphere it is not fashioned to; and Cecilia Webberly was so dazzled by the accounts she read in the daily prints, and La Belle AssemblÈe, of "great lords and ladies dressed out on gay days," that she looked on the inhabitants of Bloomsbury Square with sovereign contempt, her mother and sister inclusive, who notwithstanding encouraged and emulated her flights, flattering themselves that her eccentricities would carry her, and them as her attendants, into regions of splendour, though in truth they were only thus brought forth to the "garish eye of day," to be exposed to the contempt and ridicule her folly excited. A few days after the expedition of Mrs. Martin and her friends to Webberly House, as she was standing one fine morning at her parlour window, Mrs. Sullivan's dashing equipage drove past, and her involuntary exclamation at the sudden, and to her unpractised eyes, terrifying stop of the four horses, which were a second before at their utmost speed, was changed into an expression of pleasure, when she saw Miss Wildenheim alone alight at Mr. Slater's shop, and the showy carriage from which she descended drive away ere the door was well closed; for Mrs. Sullivan and her daughters never condescended to enter _the shop_, as it was in token of pre-eminence called in the village of Deane. The great Frederick has wisely remarked, that "_custom_ guides fools in place of _reason_;" and they had sapiently agreed amongst themselves, that "no lady of fashion was ever seen in a shop out of Bond Street;" but as for many reasons they were always anxious to prevail on Miss Wildenheim to execute their commissions, they took care not to inform her of the solecism in etiquette they had thus discovered, lest her timid and scrupulous attention to propriety should overcome her good nature, and deprive them of the benefit of her taste and judgment. The place of sale these ladies thus contemned, was a rustic pantheon-physitechnicon, where were to be had--food for the mind, at least for those who were content to "prey on garbage," and countless articles for the ladies' use. Part of the counter was covered with stationery of all descriptions, school books, last speeches, and ballads, besides a few miscellaneous articles in the reading way, such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the Seven Champions of Christendom, and the Methodistical Magazine, relating how Mr. Goodman "put on by faith," not "the armour of the Lord," but a pair of "leathern conveniences," vulgarly called _breeches_. The remainder of the counter showed, through glass panes, plated and pinchbeck _tiaras_