The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 223: what you’re looking at

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

CONTINUATION OF THE MYSTERIES 201 which will hang around you cannot fail to give an enormous impulse to the excitement and the sensation you are to create. No one will know who you are or whence you come. There will be no clue to your parentage, your connections, or your friends. People will hear that you have honourably paid for everything in fitting up your establishment, and that you are well off. They will therefore see that you are no mere adventuress. Mrs. Arbuthnot, a prudent, far-sighted, and matronly-looking woman, will be your companion, living with you altogether, riding out with you in your carriage, and accompanying you in your walks, and therefore the breath of scandal cannot injure your fair fame. ‘Thus far all circumstances will be propitious to you at the outset, and from that starting-point everything will depend upon yourself. You will have the dissipated mem- bers of the nobility seeking your acquaintance, but you must repulse them all. Hauteur to one, coldness to another, mocking disdain to a third, indignation to a fourth, and so on. Away with them all! Then you will receive tender billets beseeching interviews, making overtures of love, some in their infatuation proposing marriage, others offering to settle large sums upon you as an inducement to become their mistress. But every letter must either be returned to its writer, or else treated with stern silence. By these means you will obtain a reputation for a virtue as inaccessible as your charms are brilliant. In a few weeks the whole West End will be talking of you. But in the meantime you will have much to do. For a month to come you must every day practise music and drawing. You already possess a good elementary knowledge of these arts. Mrs. Arbuthnot, who is proficient in both, will speedily render you proficient also, for you must become eminently accomplished, as well as having the recommendations of personal loveliness and the strictest chastity. Then, too, you must read all the fashionable literature of the day. A large assortment of books necessary for these polite studies will presently go down to Acacia Cottage. Fashionable novels must form the principal portion of your reading, so that you may speedily catch an idea of the frivolities and the thousand and one elegant nothings which may be that to make up the sum of a fashionable existence. In these readings you will be assisted by Mrs. Arbuthnot, and you must never hesitate KS { r in