and unsteady on the
box. Nor was it extraordinary that there was a heavy storm of
lightning, for that happened three times a-week in the chalk hills
the summer through; nor, again, that under these circumstances the
horses, who were of the squire's own breeding, and never thoroughly
broke (nothing was done thoroughly at Whitford), went rather wildly
home, and that the carriage swung alarmingly down the steep hills,
and the boughs brushed the windows rather too often. But it was
extraordinary that Mrs. Lavington had cast off her usual primness,
and seemed to-night, for the first time in her life, in an exuberant
good humour, which she evinced by snubbing her usual favourite
Honoria, and lavishing caresses on Argemone, whose vagaries she
usually regarded with a sort of puzzled terror, like a hen who has
hatched a duckling.

'Honoria, take your feet off my dress. Argemone, my child, I hope
you spent a pleasant evening?'

Argemone answered by some tossy commonplace.

A pause--and then Mrs. Lavington recommenced,--

'How very pleasing that poor young Lord Vieuxbois is, after all!'

'I thought you disliked him so much.'

'His opinions, my child; but we must hope for the best. He seems
moral and well inclined, and really desirous of doing good in his
way; and so successful in the House, too, I hear.'

'To me,' said Argemone, 'he seems to want life, originality, depth,
everything that makes a great man. He knows nothing but what he has
picked up ready-made from books. After all, his opinions are the
one redeeming point in him.'

'Ah, my dear, when it pleases Heaven to open your eyes, you will see
as I do!'

Poor Mrs. Lavington! Unconscious spokeswoman for the ninety-nine
hundredths of the human race! What are we all doing from morning to
night, but setting up our own fancies as the measure of all heaven
and earth, and saying, each in his own dialect, Whig, Radical, or
Tory, Papist or Protestant, 'When it pleases Heaven to open your
eyes you will see as I do'?

'It is a great pity,' went on Mrs. Lavington, meditatively, 'to see
a young man so benighted and thrown away. With his vast fortune,
too--such a means of good! Really we ought to have seen a little
more of him. I think Mr. O'Blareaway's conversation might be a
blessing to him. I think of asking him over to stay a week at
Whitford, to meet that sainted young man.'

Now Argemone did not think the Reverend Panurgus O'