They could speak from private positive information of certain damnatory circumstances, derived from authentic sources.

Visits of a gentleman to the house of a married lady in the absence of the husband?
Oh!--The British Lucretia was very properly not legally at home to the masculine world of that day.

She plied her distaff in pure seclusion, meditating on her absent lord; or else a fair proportion of the masculine world, which had not yet, has not yet, 'doubled Cape Turk,' approved her condemnation to the sack.
There was talk in the feminine world, at Lady Wathin's assemblies.

The elevation of her husband had extended and deepened her influence on the levels where it reigned before, but without, strange as we may think it now, assisting to her own elevation, much aspired for, to the smooth and lively upper pavement of Society, above its tumbled strata.

She was near that distinguished surface, not on it.