s
the art of talking to the ladies. I shall try him in repartee on the
hustings. I must contrive to have our Jorian at my elbow.'

The task of getting Jorian to descend upon such a place as Chippenden
worried my father more than electoral anxieties. Jorian wrote, 'My best
wishes to you. Be careful of your heads. The habit of the Anglo-Saxon is
to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels. It is his notion of
freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence. Spare
me the Sussex accent on your return.'

My father read out the sentences of this letter with admiring bursts of
indignation at the sarcasms, and an evident idea that I inclined to
jealousy of the force displayed.

'But we must have him,' he said; 'I do not feel myself complete without
Jorian.'

So he made dispositions for a concert to be given in Chippenden town.
Jenny Chassediane was invited down to sing, and Jorian came in her wake,
of course. He came to suffer tortures. She was obliging enough to
transform me into her weapon of chastisement upon the poor fellow for his
behaviour to her at the Ball-atrocious, I was bound to confess. On this
point she hesitated just long enough to imply a doubt whether, under any
circumstances, the dues of men should be considered before those of her
sex, and then struck her hands together with enthusiasm for my father,
who was, she observed--critical in millinery in the height of her
ecstasy--the most majestic, charming, handsome Henri III. imaginable, the
pride and glory of the assembly, only one degree too rosy at night for
the tone of the lavender, needing a touch of French hands, and the merest
trifle in want of compression about the waistband. She related that a
certain Prince Henri d'Angleterre had buzzed at his ear annoyingly. 'Et
Gascoigne, ou est-il?' called the King, and the Judge stepped forth to
correct the obstreperous youth. The Judge was Jennings, clearly prepared
by my father to foil the Prince--no other than Edbury. It was
incomprehensible to me that my father should tolerate the tatter's
pranks; unless, indeed, he borrowed his name to bonds of which I heard
nothing.

Mademoiselle Chassediane vowed that her own dress was ravishing. She went
attired as a boudoir-shepherdess or demurely-coquettish Sevres-china
Ninette, such of whom Louis Quinze would chuck the chin down the deadly
introductory walks of Versailles. The reason of her desiring to go was
the fatal sin of curiosity, and, t