'That's no reason,' said Aunt Becky, who, as usual, had got up a skirmish, and was firing away in the cause of Mossop and Smock-alley play-house; 'why, she would be fraudulently arrested in her own chair, on her way to the play-house, by the contrivance of the rogue Barry, and that wicked mountebank, Woodward.' 'You're rather hard upon them, Madam,' said Mrs. Colonel Stafford, who stood up for Crow-street, with a slight elevation of her chin. 'Very true, indeed, Mistress Chattesworth,' cried the dowager, overlooking Madam Stafford's parenthesis, and tapping an applause with her fan, and, at the same time, rewarding the champion of Smock-alley, for she was one of the faction, with one of her large, painted smiles, followed by a grave and somewhat supercilious glance at the gentleman of the household; 'and I don't believe _they_, at least, can think her a spectacle, and--a--the like, or they'd hardly have conspired to lock her in a sponging-house, while she should have been in the play-house. What say you, Mistress Chattesworth?' 'Ha, ha! no, truly, my lady; but you know she's unfortunate, and a stranger, and the good people in this part of the world improve so safe an opportunity of libelling a friendless gentlewoman.' This little jet of vitriol was intended for the eye of the Castle beau; but he, quite innocent of the injection, went on serenely-- 'So they do, upon my honour, Madam, tell prodigious naughty tales about her: yet upon my life I do pity her from my soul: how that fellow Calcraft, by Jove--she says, you know, she's married to him, but we know better--he has half broken her heart, and treated her with most refined meanness, as I live; in the green-room, where she looks an infinity worse than on the stage, she told me----' 'I dare say,' said Aunt Becky, rather stiffly, pulling him up; for though she had fought a round for poor George Anne Bellamy for Mossop's sake, she nevertheless had formed a pretty just estimate of that faded, good-natured, and insolvent demirep, and rather recoiled from any anecdotes of her telling. 'And Calcraft gave her his likeness in miniature,' related the macaroni, never minding; 'set round with diamonds, and, will you believe it? when she came to examine it, they were not brilliants, but rose-diamonds--despicable fellow!' Here the talk began to spring up again in different places, and the conversation speedily turned into what we have heard it before, and the roar and confusion became universal, and swallowed up what remained of poor George Anne's persecutions. CHAPTER XXIV. IN WHICH TWO YOUNG PERSONS UNDERSTAND ONE ANOTHER BETTER, PERHAPS, THAN EVER THEY DID BEFORE, WITHOUT SAYING SO.