A great poet has said that women are all rakes at heart; and there was something of the rake at heart about Mrs.Woodward.She never could be got to express adequate horror at fast young men, and was apt to have her own sly little joke at women who prided themselves on being punctilious.

She could, perhaps, the more safely indulge in this, as scandal had never even whispered a word against herself.
With her daughters she lived on terms almost of equality.

The two elder were now grown up; that is, they were respectively eighteen and seventeen years old.

They were devotedly attached to their mother, looked on her as the only perfect woman in existence, and would willingly do nothing that could vex her; but they perhaps were not quite so systematically obedient to her as children should be to their only surviving parent.

Mrs.Woodward, however, found nothing amiss, and no one else therefore could well have a right to complain.
They were both pretty--but Gertrude, the elder, was by far the more strikingly so.