ety like a very novice. He
went everywhere. By this time he had made a great start in life, had
been brought into note in one or two important cases, and was, as
everybody knew, a young man very well thought of, and likely to do great
things at the bar; so that he was free of many houses, and had so many
invitations for his Sundays that he could well afford to be indifferent
to the loss of such a humble house as the Cottage at Windyhill. Perhaps
he wanted to persuade himself that this was the case, and that there
really was nothing to regret. And it is certain that he did visit a
great deal during that season at one house where there were two or three
agreeable daughters; the house, indeed, of Sir John Gaythorne, who was
Solicitor-General at that time, and a man who had always looked upon
John Tatham with a favourable eye. The Gaythornes had a house near
Dorking, where they often went from Saturday to Monday with a few choice
_convives_, and "picknicked," as they themselves said, but it was a
picknicking of a highly comfortable sort. John went down with them the
very Saturday after he received that letter--the Saturday on which he
had intended to go to Windyhill. And the party was very gay. To compare
it for a moment with the humdrum family at the Cottage would have been
absurd. The Gaythornes prided themselves on always having pleasant
people with them, and they had several remarkably pleasant people
that day, among whom John himself was welcomed by most persons; and
the family themselves were lively and agreeable to a high degree. A
distinguished father, a very nice mother, and three charming girls, up
to everything and who knew everybody; who had read or skimmed all the
new books of any importance, and had seen all the new pictures; who
could talk of serious things as well as they could talk nonsense, and
who were good girls to boot, looking after the poor, and visiting at
hospitals, in the intervals of their gaieties, as was then the highest
fashion in town. I do not for a moment mean to imply that the Miss
Gaythornes did their good work because it was the fashion: but the fact
that it is the fashion has liberated many girls, and allowed them to
carry out their natural wishes in that way, who otherwise would have
been restrained and hampered by parents and friends, who would have
upbraided them with making themselves remarkable, if in a former
generation they had attempted to go to Whitechapel or St. Thomas's with
an