And now she dreamed of Mr Bellingham, and smiled.
And yet, was this a more evil dream than the other?
The realities of life seemed to cut more sharply against her heart than usual that morning.

The late hours of the preceding nights, and perhaps the excitement of the evening before, had indisposed her to bear calmly the rubs and crosses which beset all Mrs Mason's young ladies at times.
For Mrs Mason, though the first dressmaker in the county, was human after all; and suffered, like her apprentices, from the same causes that affected them.

This morning she was disposed to find fault with everything, and everybody.

She seemed to have risen with the determination of putting the world and all that it contained (her world, at least) to rights before night; and abuses and negligences, which had long passed unreproved, or winked at, were to-day to be dragged to light, and sharply reprimanded.

Nothing less than perfection would satisfy Mrs Mason at such times.
She had her ideas of justice, too; but they were not divinely beautiful and true ideas; they were something more resembling a grocer's, or tea-dealer's ideas of equal right.