e work was company-promoting, and whose
diversions hardly took him beyond football and the Gaiety Theatre. I
dare say it was partly because he was so refulgently well-dressed that
I assumed him devoid of intellect. As a fact, my assumption was not
very wide of the mark.

'And Cynthia,' I thought, 'has a mind and a soul. She _is_ mind and
soul encased, as it happens, in a beautiful body. She is no more a
mate for him than a great poet would be mate for a handsome fishwife;
an Elizabeth Barrett Browning for a champion pugilist.'

It was natural that, during that Saturday evening and the following
day, conversation between Lane and myself should turn more than once
towards his sister Cynthia and her forthcoming marriage, which, I
understood, was to take place within a few weeks at St. Margaret's,
Westminster. We had become fairly intimate of late, Lane and myself,
and the introduction to various members of his family seemed to have
made us much more intimate.

'You have made no end of an impression on Miss Cynthia,' he said
pleasantly on the Saturday evening. 'She was always the literary and
artistic member of the sisterhood. She gave me special instructions to
bring you along in time for some tea to-morrow, and she means to force
you out of your hermitage while she is at Deene Place, so I warn you.
Seriously, I think, it may be good for you. You will be sure to meet
some decent people there, who will be worth knowing, not only just
now, but when Cynthia is married and set up in Sloane Street. Barthrop
has taken a house there, you know.'

With a duplicity not very creditable to me, I pretended thoughtful
agreement. A brother can tell one a good deal without putting his
information into plain words. I gathered from our talk then, and on
the following day, that the Lane family occupied the difficult
position of people who have, as it were, been born to greater riches
than they possess. Of them more had always been expected, socially,
than their straitened means permitted. The pinch had been a very real
one of late years, towards the end of the grand struggle which their
parents had passed through in educating and launching a family of two
sons and five daughters. It was easy to gather that good marriages
were very necessary for those five daughters, of whom Cynthia was the
first-born. I even gathered that, a year or two earlier, there had
been scenes and grave anxiety over a preference which Cynthia had
shown for a pain