; but for a man to be fond of shuffling
and twirling himself out of the dignity of step which nature gave
him--picking his way through a quadrille, like a goose upon hot bricks,
or gyrating like a bad tee-totum in what English fashionables are
pleased to term a "valse," I never see a man thus occupied, without a
fervent desire to kick him. "What a Goth!" I hear a fair reader of
eighteen, prettily ejaculate--"thank Heaven, that all men have not such
barbarous ideas! Why, I would go fifty miles to a good ball!" Be not
alarmed, my dear young lady; give me but a moment to thank Providence,
in my turn, that you are neither my sister nor my daughter, and I will
promise you that you shall never be my wife.

On the Saturday night, then, I made Gordon and Willingham both very
cross, and caught Sydney Dawson's eye looking over his spectacles with
supreme contempt, when I declared my decided intention of staying at
home the night of the ball. Even the Reverend Robert Hanmer, who was
going himself, was annoyed when Gordon told him of what he called my
wilfulness, having a notion that it was decidedly disrespectful in any
of us, either to go when he did _not_, or to decline going when he
_did_.

On the Tuesday morning, I sent to B---- for white kids. Gordon looked
astonished, Hanmer was glad that I had "taken his advice," and
Willingham laughed outright; he had overheard Clara Phillips ask me to
dance with her. Men _are_ like green gooseberries--very green ones;
women _do_ make fools of them, and a comparatively small proportion of
sugar, in the shape of flattery, is sufficient.

Two days before the regatta, there marched into Mrs Jenkins's open
doorway, a bewildered-looking gentleman, shaking off the dust from his
feet in testimony of having had a long walk, and inquiring for Hanmer.
Gwenny, with her natural grace, trotted up-stairs before him, put her
head in at the "drawing-room" door (she seemed always conscious that the
less one saw of her person the better), and having announced briefly,
but emphatically, "a gentlemans," retreated. Hanmer had puzzled himself
and me by an attempt to explain a passage which Aristotle, of course,
would have put in plainer language if he had known what he meant
himself--but modern philosophers are kind enough to help him out
occasionally--when the entrance of the gentleman in dust cut the Gordian
knot, and saved the Stagyrite from the disgrace of having a pretty bit
of esoteric abstruseness tra