Of this argument Lady Sara knew little. She never reflected on the true nature of religion, though she sometimes went to church, repeated the prayers, without being conscious of their spirit; and when the coughing, sneezing, and blowing of noses which commonly accompany the text subsided, she generally called up the remembrance of the last ball, or an anticipation of the next assembly, to amuse herself until the prosing business was over. From church she drove to the Park, where, bowling round the ring, or sauntering in the gardens, she soon forgot that there existed in the universe a Power of higher consequence to please than her own vanity--and the admiration of the spectators. Lady Sara would have shuddered at hearing any one declare himself a deist, much more an atheist; but for any influence which her nominal belief held over her desires, she might as well have been either. She never committed an action deserving the name of premeditated injury, nor went far out of her way to do her best friend a service,--not because she wanted inclination, but she ceased to remember both the petitioner and his petition before he had been five minutes from her sight. She had read as much as most fine ladies have read: a few histories, a few volumes of essays, a few novels, and now and then a little poetry comprised the whole range of her studies; these, with morning calls and evening assemblies, occupied her whole day. Such had been the routine of her life until she met the once "young star" of Poland, Thaddeus Sobieski, in an unknown exile, an almost nameless guest, at Lady Tinemouth's, which event caused a total revolution in her mind and conduct. The strength of Lady Sara's understanding might have credited a better education; but her passions bearing an equal power with this mental vigor, and having taken a wrong direction, she neither acknowledged the will nor the capability to give the empire to her reason. When love really entered her heart, its first conquest was over her universal vanity; she surrendered all her admirers, in the hope of securing the admiration of Thaddeus; its second victory mastered her discretion; she revealed her unhappy affection to Lady Tinemouth, and more than hinted it to himself. What had she else to lose? She believed her honor to be safer than her life. Her _honor_ was the term. She had no conception, or, at best, a faint one, that a breach of the marriage vow could be an outrage on the laws of Heaven. The word sin had been gradually ignored by the oligarchy of fashion, from the hour in which Charles the Second and his profligate court trod down piety with hypocrisy; and in this day the new philosophy has accomplished its total outlawry, denouncing it as a rebel to decency and the freedom of man.