The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 333: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER XXXII THE PEARLS VENETIA was somewhat indisposed by the fatigues attend- ant on the private theatricals, the banquet, and the late hour at which she retired to rest, and she did not quit her chamber during the whole of the day the incidents of which we have detailed in the last few chapters. She gave orders to her faithful Jessica that she wished to be left perfectly tranquil, and not to be persecuted with visits, letters, or messages; and although invited to Lady Wenlock’s masked ball, she was compelled to remain absent, so great was the sense of exhaustion which she experienced. This was the first day that Venetia had passed alone for some time. ‘The reader may be therefore well assured that she had a long communing with herself. She thought of many things, some agreeable, some disagreeable, of gratified ambition on the one hand, and a career of dissipation on the other, of the exalted flight which she had taken up into the aristocratic heaven with a coronet upon her brow, and of the downward plunge which she had likewise made into the vortex of profligacy. But did she repent of the course which she had pursued? And in order to regain her virtue, would she abandon her haughty rank and descend from the pedestal to which the royal hand had raised her? No such thing! The time for such regret was past, nor were there ever such holy lights burning in the sanctuary of her soul as would have served to irradiate a career of immaculate virtue. Within herself, as it were, did she possess the principles of her own moral ruin, the elements of degradation from pris- tine virtue and innocence. For she had passions to gratify and feelings to minister unto, which in themselves became incompatible with a virtuous career. Being originally so 300 Gomicbooks (E(0) m