manners, that so well beseemed a nobly-born one, and more than all, her
correction of his little weaknesses and incompetencies, in spite of his
dislike of it, won him. He began to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in
her grotesque sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the old ones
while dreading the arrival of new. You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of
the swish; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives
their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking,
Lady Camper's foregone outlines of him. For in the distance, the
whip's-end may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging flick.
But this craven melting in his heart was rebuked by a very worthy pride,
that flew for support to the injury she had done to his devotions, and
the offence to the sacred edifice. After thinking over it, he decided
that he must quit his residence; and as it appeared to him in the light
of duty, he, with an unspoken anguish, commissioned the house-agent of
his town to sell his lease or let the house furnished, without further
parley.

From the house-agent's shop he turned into the chemist's, for a tonic--a
foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough in the blow he had
just dealt himself, but he had been cogitating on tonics recently,
imagining certain valiant effects of them, with visions of a former
careless happiness that they were likely to restore. So he requested to
have the tonic strong, and he took one glass of it over the counter.

Fifteen minutes after the draught, he came in sight of his house, and
beholding it, he could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud under
Lady Camper's windows, his insurgency was of such violence. He talked of
it incessantly, but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was looking pale,
the reason why its modest merits touched him so. He longed for the hour
of his next dose, and for a caricature to follow, that he might drink and
defy it. A caricature was really due to him, he thought; otherwise why
had he abandoned his bijou dwelling? Lady Camper, however, sent none. He
had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that was rather a likeness,
and a handsome likeness, except as regarded a certain disorderliness in
his dress, which he knew to be very unlike him. Still it despatched him
to the looking-glass, to bring that verifier of facts in evidence against
the sketch. While sitting there he heard the housemaid's knock at the
door, and the