asted when they could kindle up a
little gleam of chivalry in the embers of that wasted heart!

He ran over in his mind all the Lady Julias and Georginasof the
fashionable world. He bethought him of each of those who had been the
queens of London seasons, and yet how vastly were they all her
inferiors! It was not alone that in beauty she eclipsed them, but she
possessed, besides, the thousand nameless attractions of manner and
gesture, a certain blended dignity and youthful gayety that made her
seem the very ideal of high-born loveliness. He had seen dukes'
daughters who could not vie with her in these gifts; he had known
countesses immeasurably beneath her. From these thoughts he went on to
others as to her future, and the kind of fellow that might marry her;
for, strangely enough, in all his homage there mingled the ever-present
memory of Grog and his pursuits. Mountjoy Stubbs might marry her; he has
fifty thousand a year, and his father was a pawnbroker. Lockwood Harris
might marry her; he got all his money from the slave trade. There were
three or four more,--all wealthy, and all equivocal in position: men to
be seen in clubs, to be dined with and played with; fellows who had
yachts at Cowes and grouse-lodges in Scotland, and yet in London were
"nowhere." These men could within their own sphere do all they
pleased,--they could afford any extravagance they fancied; and what a
delightful extravagance it would be to marry Lizzy Davis! Often as he
had envied these men, he never did so more than now. _They_ had no
responsibilities of station ever hanging over them; no brothers in the
Peerage to bully them about this; no sisters in waiting to worry them
about that. They could always, as he phrased it, "paint their coach
their own color," without any fear of the Herald's Office; and what
better existence could a man wish for than a prolific fancy and
unlimited funds to indulge it. "If I were Stubbs, I 'd marry her." This
he said fully a dozen times over, and even confirmed it with an oath.
And what an amiable race of people are the Stubbses of this habitable
globe! how loosely do responsibilities sit upon them! how generously are
they permitted every measure of extravagance and every violation of good
taste! What a painful contrast did his mind draw between Stubbs'
condition and his own! There was a time, too, when the State repaired in
some sort the injustice that younger sons groaned under,--the public
service was full o