eboard; and the probable value of the
plate. Such a dinner he calculated could not be dished up under
fifteen or eighteen dollars per head. And he was in the habit, until
very lately, of sending over proteges, with letters of recommendation
to the present Marquis of Steyne, encouraged to do so by the intimate
terms on which he had lived with his dear friend, the late lord. He
was most indignant that a young and insignificant aristocrat, the Earl
of Southdown, should have taken the pas of him in their procession to
the dining-room. "Just as I was stepping up to offer my hand to a
very pleasing and witty fashionable, the brilliant and exclusive Mrs.
Rawdon Crawley,"--he wrote--"the young patrician interposed between me
and the lady and whisked my Helen off without a word of apology. I was
fain to bring up the rear with the Colonel, the lady's husband, a stout
red-faced warrior who distinguished himself at Waterloo, where he had
better luck than befell some of his brother redcoats at New Orleans."

The Colonel's countenance on coming into this polite society wore as
many blushes as the face of a boy of sixteen assumes when he is
confronted with his sister's schoolfellows. It has been told before
that honest Rawdon had not been much used at any period of his life to
ladies' company. With the men at the Club or the mess room, he was
well enough; and could ride, bet, smoke, or play at billiards with the
boldest of them. He had had his time for female friendships too, but
that was twenty years ago, and the ladies were of the rank of those
with whom Young Marlow in the comedy is represented as having been
familiar before he became abashed in the presence of Miss Hardcastle.
The times are such that one scarcely dares to allude to that kind of
company which thousands of our young men in Vanity Fair are frequenting
every day, which nightly fills casinos and dancing-rooms, which is
known to exist as well as the Ring in Hyde Park or the Congregation at
St. James's--but which the most squeamish if not the most moral of
societies is determined to ignore. In a word, although Colonel Crawley
was now five-and-forty years of age, it had not been his lot in life to
meet with a half dozen good women, besides his paragon of a wife. All
except her and his kind sister Lady Jane, whose gentle nature had tamed
and won him, scared the worthy Colonel, and on occasion of his first
dinner at Gaunt House he was not heard to make a single rema