** spoiler alert ** I didn't like this quite as much as the first book I'm afraid, but it was quite well written in places. It also brings to mind Objectivism quite strongly in some places! Three quotes:

(Baronness Orczy gives a rare depiction of a girl who dances on the streets as dejected instead of sexy. I think this would have been much easier for people of the time with a class consciousness to understand, than today, where a gender consciousness seems to have completely taken hold.)
a woman almost unsexed by misery, starvation, and the abnormal excitement engendered by daily spectacles of revenge and of cruelty. They were to be met with every day, round every street corner, these harridans, more terrible far than were the men. This one was still comparatively young, thirty at most; would have been good-looking too, for the features were really delicate, the nose chiselled, the brow straight, the chin round and small. But the mouth! Heavens, what a mouth! Hard and cruel and thin-lipped; and those eyes! sunken and rimmed with purple; eyes that told tales of sorrow and, yes! of degradation. The crowd stood round her, sullen and apathetic; poor, miserable wretches like herself, staring at her antics with lack-lustre eyes and an ever-recurrent contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. The woman was dancing, contorting her body in the small circle of light formed by a flickering lanthorn which was hung across the street from house to house, striking the muddy pavement with her shoeless feet, all to the sound of a be-ribboned tambourine which she struck now and again with her small, grimy hand. From time to time she paused,

(Someone who refuses to submit to the wishes of a villain just because they threaten harm - I'm sure the objectivists would love the Baroness)
he chooses to declare that it is I who, by rejecting his love, drove him to these foul extremities. May God forgive him that abominable lie! The evil we do, Monsieur, is within us; it does not come from circumstance.

(Perhaps this book is now a little bit out of its time...)
Esther was no fool, nor was she unsophisticated. These were not times when it was possible for any girl, however carefully nurtured and tenderly brought up, to remain ignorant of the realities and the brutalities of life. Even before Merri had put his abominable proposition before her, she knew what he was driving at. Marriage— marriage to him! that ignoble wretch, more vile than any dumb creature! In exchange for her life!