For she was so much the mechanical creature of the world, that even her affection was warm or cold in proportion as the world shone on it.

Without being absolutely in love with her husband, she liked him--they suited each other; and (in spite of all the temptations that had beset her in their earlier years, for she had been esteemed a beauty--and lived, as worldly people must do, in circles where examples of unpunished gallantry are numerous and contagious) her conduct had ever been scrupulously correct.

She had little or no feeling for misfortunes with which she had never come into contact; for those with which she had--such as the distresses of younger sons, or the errors of fashionable women, or the disappointments of "a proper ambition"-- she had more sympathy than might have been supposed, and touched on them with all the tact of well-bred charity and ladylike forbearance.

Thus, though she was regarded as a strict person in point of moral decorum, yet in society she was popular-as women at once pretty and inoffensive generally are.
To do Mrs.Beaufort justice, she had not been privy to the letter her husband wrote to Catherine, although not wholly innocent of it.

The fact is, that Robert had never mentioned to her the peculiar circumstances that made Catherine an exception from ordinary rules--the generous propositions of his brother to him the night before his death; and, whatever his incredulity as to the alleged private marriage, the perfect loyalty and faith that Catherine had borne to the deceased,--he had merely observed, "I must do something, I suppose, for that woman; she very nearly entrapped my poor brother into marrying her; and he would then, for what I know, have cut Arthur out of the estates.