are cousins. 'Tis the fashion to have
our tattle done by machinery. They have their opportunity to compare the
portrait with the original. Come, invent some scandal for us; let us make
this place our social Exchange. I warrant a good bold piece of invention
will fit them, too, some of them. Madam,'--my father bowed low to the
beckoning of a fan, 'I trust your ladyship did not chance to overhear
that last remark I made?'

The lady replied: 'I should have shut my eyes if I had. I called you to
tell me, who is the young man?'

'For twenty years I have lived in the proud belief that he is my son!'

'I would not disturb it for the world.' She did me the honour to inspect
me from the lowest waistcoat button to the eyebrows. 'Bring him to me
to-night. Captain DeWitt, you have forsaken my whist-tables.'

'Purely temporary fits of unworthiness, my lady.'

'In English, gout?'

'Not gout in the conscience, I trust,' said my father.

'Oh! that's curable,' laughed the captain.

'You men of repartee would be nothing without your wickedness,' the lady
observed.

'Man was supposed to be incomplete--' Captain DeWitt affected a murmur.

She nodded 'Yes, yes,' and lifted eyes on my father. 'So you have not
given up going to church?'

He bent and spoke low.

She humphed her lips. 'Very well, I will see. It must be a night in the
early part of the week after next, then: I really don't know why I should
serve you; but I like your courage.'

'I cannot consent to accept your ladyship's favour on account of one
single virtue,' said he, drooping.

She waved him to move forward.

During this frothy dialogue, I could see that the ear of the assembly had
been caught by the sound of it.

'That,' my father informed me, 'is the great Lady Wilts. Now you will
notice a curious thing. Lady Wilts is not so old but that, as our Jorian
here says of her, she is marriageable. Hence, Richie, she is a queen to
make the masculine knee knock the ground. I fear the same is not to be
said of her rival, Lady Denewdney, whom our good Jorian compares to an
antiquated fledgeling emerging with effort from a nest of ill
construction and worse cement. She is rich, she is sharp, she uses her
quill; she is emphatically not marriageable. Bath might still accept her
as a rival queen, only she is always behindhand in seizing an occasion.
Now you will catch sight of her fan working in a minute. She is envious
and imitative. It would be undoubtedly better po