utterly dejected, she felt, with the keenest anguish, the first symptoms of the decline of public admiration. It was just at this period, when she was miserably in want of the consolations of flattery, that Vivian’s acquaintance with her commenced. Gratified by the sort of delighted surprise which she saw in his countenance the first moment he beheld her, seeing that he was an agreeable man, and knowing that he was a man of fortune and family, she took pains to please him by all the common arts of coquetry. But his vanity was proof against these: the weakness of the lady’s understanding and the frivolity of her character were, for some weeks, sufficient antidotes against all the power of her personal charms; so much so, that at this period he often compared, or rather contrasted, Mrs. Wharton and Selina, and blessed his happy fate. He wrote to his friend Russell soon after he was introduced to this celebrated beauty, and drew a strong and just parallel between the characters of these two ladies: he concluded with saying, “Notwithstanding your well-founded dread of the volatility of my character, you will not, I hope, my dear Russell, do me the injustice to apprehend that I am in any danger from the charms of Mrs. Wharton.” Vivian wrote with perfect sincerity; he believed it to be impossible that he could ever become attached to such a woman as Mrs. Wharton, even if she had not been married, and the wife of his friend. So, in all the security of conscious contempt, he went every day to wait upon her, or rather to meet agreeable company at her house,--a house in which all that was fashionable and dissipated assembled; where beauty, and talents, and rank, met and mingled; and where political or other arrangements prevented the host and hostess from scrupulously excluding some whose characters were not free from suspicion. Lady Mary Vivian never went to Mrs. Wharton’s; but she acknowledged that she knew many ladies of unblemished reputation who thought it no impropriety to visit there; and Mrs. Wharton’s own character she knew was hitherto unimpeached. “She is, indeed, a woman of a cold, selfish temper,” said Lady Mary; “not likely to be led into danger by the tender passion, or by any of the delusions of the imagination.”