Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/266

246 or fourteen, boys went to the University at fifteen or sixteen. Early marriages and large families weighed heavily on both sexes at a time when infant meortality was tremendous and infection stalked unchecked through the land. Fevers, agues, measles, and small-pox carried off whole families or scored young faces with fatal blemish. One recalls the pathetic scene, so graphically sketched by Thackeray, of Lady Castlewood after the small-pox. "When the marks of the disease cleared away they did not, it is true, leave furrows or scars on her face (except one, perhaps, on her forehead over her left eye), but the delicacy of her rosy colour and complexion was gone; her eyes had lost their brilliancy, her hair fell, and her face looked older. It was as if a coarse hand had rubbed off the delicate tints of that sweet picture and brought it, as one has seen some unskilful painting cleaners do, to the dead colour. Also it must be owned that for a year or two after the malady her Ladyship's nose was swollen and redder." And the sequel, despite courtly flattery, how little Esmond broke out honestly protesting that his mistress was no longer so handsome as she was, "on which Lady Castlewood gave a rueful smile and a look into a