eadful manager who destroyed the books
and then fled, so that there never could be a right winding up of the
affairs."

"I hope Philip will take great care never to have to do with anything of
the kind again."

"Oh, no, he has promised me he will not. I will not have it. He has a
kind of ornamental directorship on this new company, just for the sake
of his name: but he has promised me he will have nothing more to do with
it for my peace of mind."

"I wonder that they should care in the city for so small a matter as a
peer's younger son."

"Oh, do you think it a small matter, mamma? I don't mean that I care,
but people give a good deal of weight to it, you know."

"I meant only in the city, Elinor."

"Oh!" Elinor said. She was half offended with her mother's indifference.
She had found that to be the Hon. Mrs. Compton was something, or so at
least she supposed: and she began timidly to give her mother a list of
her engagements, which were indeed many in number, and there were some
dazzling names among a great many with which Mrs. Dennistoun was
unacquainted. But how could she know who were the fashionable people
nowadays, a woman living so completely out of the world?

John Tatham, for his part, went through his engagements that year with a
constant expectation of seeing Elinor, which preoccupied him more than a
rising young barrister going everywhere ought to have been preoccupied.
He thought he went everywhere, and so did his family at home, especially
his sister, Mary Tatham, who was his father's nurse and attendant, and
never had any chance of sharing these delights. She made all the more,
as was natural, of John's privileges and social success from the fact of
her own seclusion, and was in the habit of saying that she believed
there was scarcely a party in London to which John was not invited--three
or four in a night. But it would seem with all this that there were many
parties to which he was not invited, for the Phil Comptons (how strange
and on the whole disgusting to think that this now meant Elinor!) also
went everywhere, and yet they very seldom met. It was true that John
could not expect to meet them at dinner at a Judge's or in the legal
society in high places which was his especial sphere, and nothing could
be more foolish than the tremor of expectation with which this very
steady-going man would set out to every house in which the fashionable
world met with the professional, always thinking that p