ed hat, and
instead of knocking his heels on the pavement walked with a gait as
delicate as a lady's. Going out of the area-door with a cigar in his
mouth, he mounted the steps hastily to keep an appointment round the
corner--the keeping of which as a private gentleman necessitated the
change of the greater part of his clothes twice within a quarter of an
hour--the limit of his time of absence. The other footman was upstairs,
and the butler, finding that he had a few minutes to himself, sat down at
the table and wrote:--

'MY DEAR ETHELBERTA,--I did not intend to write to you for some few
days to come, but the way in which you have been talked about here
this evening makes me anxious to send a line or two at once, though I
have very little time to spare, as usual. We have just had a dinner-
party--indeed the carriages have not yet been brought round--and the
talk at dinner was about your verses, of course. The thing was
brought up by a young fellow named Ladywell--do you know him? He is a
painter by profession, but he has a pretty good private income beyond
what he gets by practising his line of business among the nobility,
and that I expect is not little, for he is well known, and encouraged
because he is young, and good-looking, and so forth. His family own a
good bit of land somewhere out Aldbrickham way. However, I am before
my story. From what they all said it is pretty clear that you are
thought a great deal of in fashionable society as a poetess--but
perhaps you know this as well as I--moving in it as you do yourself,
my dear.

'The ladies afterwards got very curious about your age, so curious, in
fact, and so full of certainty that you were thirty-five and a
blighted existence, if an hour, that I felt inclined to rap out there
and then, and hang what came of it: "My daughter, ladies, was to my
own and her mother's certain knowledge only twenty-one last birthday,
and has as bright a heart as anybody in London." One of them actually
said that you must be fifty to have got such an experience. Her guess
was a very shrewd one in the bottom of it, however, for it was
grounded upon the way you use those strange experiences of mine in the
society that I tell you of, and dress them up as if they were yours;
and, as you see, she hit off my own age to a year. I thought it was
very sharp of her to be so right, although so wrong.