Mr. William Sim, therefore, began the world under the most favourable circumstances.  He found a fortune prepared to his hands; he had only to improve it.  In a few years the old grocer died; and he bequeathed to them the gains of half a century.  For twenty years Mr. Sim continued in business, and he had nearly doubled the fortune which he obtained with his wife.  Mrs. Sim was a kind-hearted woman; but by nature, or through education, she had also a considerable portion of vanity, and she began to think that it was the duty of her opulent husband to retire from business, and assume the character of an independent gentleman; or rather, I ought to say, of a country gentleman—­a squire.  She professed to be the more anxious that he should do this on account of the health of her daughter—­the sole survivor of five children—­and who was then entering upon womanhood.  Maria Sim (for such was their daughter’s name) was a delicate and accomplished girl of seventeen.  The lovely hue that dwelt upon her cheeks, like the blush of a rainbow, was an emblem of beauty, not of health.  At the solicitations of her mother, her father gave up his business, and purchased a neat villa, and a few acres that surrounded it, in the neighbourhood of Windermere.  The house lay in the bosom of poetry; and the winds that shouted like a triumphant army through the mountain glens, or in gentle zephyrs sighed upon the lake, and gambolled with the ripples, made music around it.

The change, the beauty, I had almost said the deliciousness of their place of abode, had effected a wondrous improvement in the health of Maria; yet her mother was not happy.  She was not treated by her neighbours with the obsequious reverence which she believed to be due to persons possessed of twenty thousand pounds.  The fashionable ladies in the neighbourhood, also, called her “a mean person”—­“a nobody”—­“an upstart of yesterday.”  In truth, there were not a few who so spoke, because they envied the wealth of the Sims, and were resolved to humble them.

An opportunity for them to do so soon occurred.  A subscription ball or assembly, patronized by all the fashionables in the district, was to take place at Keswick.  Mrs. Sim, in some measure from a desire of display, and also, as she said, to bring out Maria, put down her husband’s name, her own, and their daughter’s, on the list.  Many of the personages above referred to, on seeing the names of the Sim family on the subscription paper, turned upon their heel, and exclaimed—­“Shocking!”

But the important evening arrived.  Mrs. Sim had ordered a superb dress from London expressly for the occasion.  A duchess might have worn it at a drawing-room.  The dress of Maria was simplicity typified, and consisted of a frock of the finest and the whitest muslin; while her slender waist was girdled with a lavender ribbon, her raven hair descended down her snowy neck in ringlets, and around her head she wore a wreath of roses.