s a
strong, healthy, sensuous nature, in which the physical far outweighed
the intellectual; and yet I verily believe his conscience sometimes
nearly drove him mad.

Then there was my lady, sitting at the top of her table, the very
picture of a courteous, affable, well-bred hostess; perhaps, if
anything, a little too placid and immovable in her outward demeanour.
Who would have guessed at the wild and stormy passions that could rage
beneath so calm a surface? Who would suppose that stately, reserved,
majestic-looking woman had the recklessness of a brigand and the
caprices of a child? A physiognomist might have marked the traces of
strong feelings in her deepened eyes and the lines about her
mouth--damages done by the hurricane, that years of calm can never
repair; but there had been a page or two in Lady Scapegrace's life
that, with all his acuteness, would have astonished Lavater himself.
Then there was Miss Molasses, the pink of propriety and
"what-would-mamma-say" young ladyism--cold as a statue, and, as old
Chaucer says, "upright as a bolt," but all the time over head and ears
in love with Frank Lovell, and ready to do anything he asked her at a
moment's notice. There was Frank himself, gay and _debonnair_:
outwardly the lightest-hearted man in the company; inwardly, I have
reason to know, tormented with misgivings and stung by self-reproach.
Playing a double game--attached to one woman and courting another,
despising himself thoroughly the while; hemmed in by difficulties and
loaded with debt, hampered by a bad book on "The Two Thousand," and
playing hide-and-seek even now with the Jews--Frank's real existence
was very different from the one he showed his friends. So with the
rest of the party. Old Mrs. Molasses was bothered by her maid; Mr.
Lumley puzzled by his beetles; his wife involved in a thousand schemes
of mischief-making, which kept her in perpetual hot water: all, even
honest Cousin John, were sedulously hiding their real thoughts from
their companions; all were playing the game with counters, of which
indeed they were lavish enough; but had you asked for a bit of
sterling coin, fresh from the Mint and stamped with the impress of
truth, they would have buttoned their pockets closer than ever--ay,
though you had been bankrupt and penniless, they would have seen you
further first, and _then they wouldn't_.

So we flirted, and talked, and laughed, and adjourned to the
drawing-room, where, after a proper