The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 389: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXXVI MRS. BRACE AND HER VISITORS Ir was the Sabbath evening, and Mrs. Brace was seated alone in her exquisitely furnished parlour. Some of her young ladies had gone to pass the day with their parents or friends; others had obtained permission to “‘ go to church,’’ — which meant that they had certain little amatory appointments to keep; and a few remained in their own apartment, chatting together or reading novels. Mrs. Brace had, as a matter of course, attended divine service in the morning at St. James’s Church; and no one present on the occasion had appeared to pay a more marked attention than this lady to the eloquent discourse of the Reverend Doctor Twaddler. On leaving the sacred edifice, when the ceremony was concluded, she had observed to two or three female friends whom she encountered in the porch, ‘““ What a beautiful sermon!” and, having thus sustained her reputation of being a woman having a due sense of religion in her soul, she returned home, laughing in her sleeve at the facility with which a character for piety is obtained in this land of cant, humbug, and hypocrisy. And now, at about six o’clock in the evening of this same Sunday, we find the handsome milliner seated by the cheerful fire in her elegant little parlour, and amusing herself with a number of the Town and Country Magazine, a publication which chronicled the fashions and scandal of the times, and which, being written in a style that would bring a blush to the cheek, even in a brothel, enjoyed a large circulation amongst the aristocratic classes. For the prurient imaginations of ladies in high life have ever revelled in scenes of licentiousness, whether described in books or delineated in pictures. For this reason Shake- 304 COMnnie ODOOkKS ae)