ty on questions of masculine license was her husband. He,
being appealed to, had to admit that his own hours in youth had been
late, and that he supposed the hours of a newer generation should
properly be later still. Mr. Dolph forgot, perhaps, that while his early
potations had been vinous, those of the later age were distinctly
spirituous; and that the early morning cocktail and the midnight
brandy-and-soda were abominations unknown to his own well-bred youth.
With port and sherry and good Bordeaux he had been familiar all his
life; a dash of _liqueur_ after dinner did not trouble his digestion; he
found a bottle of champagne a pleasant appetizer and a gentle stimulant;
but whiskey and gin were to him the drinks of the vulgar; and rum and
brandy stood on his sideboard only to please fiercer tastes than his
own. Perhaps, also, he was ignorant of the temptations that assail a
young man in a great city, he who had grown up in such a little one that
he had at one time known every one who was worth knowing in it.

However this may have been, Eustace Dolph ruled for himself his going
out and his coming in. He went further, and chose his own associates,
not always from among the scions of the "old families." He found those
excellent young men "slow," and he selected for his own private circle a
set which was mixed as to origin and unanimously frivolous as to
tendency. The foreign element was strongly represented. Bright young
Irishmen of excellent families, and mysterious French and Italian counts
and marquises, borrowed many of the good gold dollars of the Dolphs,
and forgot to return an equivalent in the local currency of the
O'Reagans of Castle Reagan, or the D'Arcy de Montmorenci, or the
Montescudi di Bajocchi. Among this set there was much merry-making when
the news from the Dolph household sifted down to them from the
gossip-sieve of the best society. They could not very well chaff young
Dolph openly, for he was muscular and high-tempered, and, under the most
agreeable conditions, needed a fight of some sort every six months or
so, and liked a bit of trouble in between fights. But a good deal of low
and malicious humor came his way, from one source or another, and he,
with the hot and concentrated egotism of youth, thought that he was in a
ridiculous and trying position, and chafed over it.

[Illustration]

There had been innuendos and hints and glancing allusions, but no one
had dared to make any direct assault of w