Mrs Clyde was a thorough woman of the world. Judging her out of her own circle of limited diameter, you would imagine her to be cool, unimpassioned, cold-blooded, narrow-minded; but, she could be, at the same time, bigoted enough in regard to all that concerned herself, her social surroundings and her belongings--an advocate, as warm as Demosthenes, as logical as Cicero:--a partisan amongst partisans. Warm and impulsive, where fervour and a display of seemingly-generous enthusiasm would effect the object she had in view, that of compassing her ends, she could also be as frigid as an icicle, when it likewise so suited her purpose. "Respectability" and "position" were her gods:--the "world"--_her_ world!--her microcosm. Where persons and things agreed with these, being sympathetic to their rules and regulations, they naturally belonged to "the house beautiful" of her creed, for they _must_ be good:--where they ran counter to such standards of merit, which were upheld by laws as unvarying and unchangeable as those of the Medes and Persians, and administered by a judge as stern as Draco--they were, they _must_ be evil; and were, therefore, cast out into the outer darkness that existed beyond her sacred Lares and Penates. Good Heavens! how can pigmy people, atoms in the vast eternity of time, thus narrow the great universe in which they are permitted to exist; dwarfing it down, to the limit of their jaundiced vision, by the application of their miserable measuring tape of "fashionable" feet and "class" inches! How can they abase grand humanity to the level of their social organon, affecting to control it with their arbitrary absolutisms, their mammon deification, their mimic infallibility! What creeping, crawling, wretched insects we all are, taken collectively; and, of all of us, the blindest, the most insignificant, and most grub- like, are, so-called men and women "of the world!" Cold, heartless, in a general sense, and worldly as Mrs Clyde was, I could easily have excused it in her and tried to like her, for, was she not the mother of my darling, whom with all her faults she loved very dearly--her affection being judiciously tempered by those considerations paramount in the clique to which she belonged? But, Mrs Clyde did not like _me_. She spurned every effort I essayed to make her my friend. I saw this the first evening I passed in her house; and the impression I then received never wore off.