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.
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