Sink or Swim? , Volume III

If the reader of this half-true story has followed with any portion of just indignation the tortuous ways through which an insane craving after power has lead the nominal heroine of these pages, he or she will not regret to learn that, in consequence of a high legal opinion -- _the_ highest, indeed, in the land -- having been given, at the eleventh hour, against the possibility of setting aside Earl Gillingham's last will and testament, Lady Millicent was forced, with a reluctance comparable only to the pang of plucking out a right eye or wrenching out a wrong tooth, to abandon the unfilial as well as unmotherly intention which she had so long secretly as well as avowedly harboured.

The intense though silent wrath of Lady Millicent when she found that the great law-lords were not to be led -- albeit the forceps or chain, call it what you will, was held and drawn by a lady of great estate, strong courage, and ancient name -- by the nose may be better imagined than described. Misfortunes never, according to the old adage, come singly, and this autocratic lady found the proof of the proverb to her cost. In her youth she had never cared to provide herself with friends, and, when it was too late, she made the unwelcome discovery that there are certain manufactures of which the art cannot be learned save in the freshness and elasticity of early womanhood. The world, too, which had interested itself a good deal in Lady Millicent's efforts, and which was hesitating as to its decision from a laudable desire to side with the strongest, bore rather hardly in her discomfiture on the baffled and indignant woman. That she had been unmotherly, grasping, avaricious -- everything that was least feminine and most odious -- everyone was more than willing to allow; whereas Arthur -- regarding whom heads had been ominously shaken, and of whose scampishness so many (while the great affair was in abeyance) had a word, more or less severe, to say -- became once more the popular "young fellow," the idol of fair women's hearts, and the object of future attacks from prudent mammas and half-despairing _demoiselles à marier_.