And yet Mrs. Sidebottom belonged, neither by birth nor by marriage nor by acceptance, to a superior class. She was the daughter of a manufacturer, and the widow of a small country attorney. As the paralytic in the sheep-market waited for an angel to put him into the pool, so did Mrs. Sidebottom spend her time and exhaust her powers in vain endeavours to get dipped in the cleansing basin of county society, in which she might be purged of the taint of trade. And, like the paralytic of the story, she had to wait, and was disappointed annually, and had the mortification of seeing some neighbour or acquaintance step past her and enter the desired circle, whilst she was making ready and beating about for an introducer.
She attended concerts, public balls, went to missionary meetings; she joined working parties for charitable objects, took stalls at bazaars, hoping by these means to get within the vortex of the fashionable world and be drawn in, but was always disappointed. Round every eddy may be seen sticks and straws that spin on their own axes; they make dashes inwards, and are repelled, never succeeding in being caught by the coil of the whirlpool. So was she ever hovering on the outskirts of the aristocratic ring, ever aiming to pierce it, and always missing her object.
A poem by Kenrick, written at the coronation of George III., represents that celebrated beauty and toast, the Countess of Coventry, recently deceased, applying to Pluto for permission to return to earth and mingle in the entertainments of the Coronation. Pluto gives his consent; she may go—but as a ghost remain unseen.
’A fig for fine sights, if unseen one’s fine face, What signifies seeing, if one’s self is not seen?’
So Mrs. Sidebottom found that it was very little pleasure to her to hover about genteel society, and see into it, without herself being seen in it. Her descent to Mergatroyd was in part due to a rebuff she had met with at York, quite as much as to her desire to conciliate her half-brother. She trusted that when she returned to York she would be so much richer than before that this would afford her the requisite momentum which might impel her within the magic circle, within which, when once rotating, she would be safe, confident of being able to maintain her place.