ur culture would ever make anything of me."

"How is Charlotte?" asked Mrs. Ricketts, this being the familiar for
Lady F.

"Just as you saw her last. Thinner, perhaps, but looking admirably."

"And the dear Duke how is he?"

"Gouty always gouty but able to be about."

"I am so glad to hear it. It is so refreshing to talk of old friends."

"They are always talking of you. I'm sure, 'Zoe' forgive me the liberty
Zoe Ricketts is an authority on every subject of taste and literature."

"How did you come here, my Lord?" whispered Haggerstone.

"The new opera broke down, and there is no house open before twelve,"
was the hasty reply.

"Is Jemima married, my Lord?"

"No. There 's something or other wrong about the settlements. Who's the
foreigner, Haggy?"

"A Pole. Petrolaffsky."

"No, no not a bit of it. _I_ know him," said the other, rapidly; then,
turning to Mrs. Ricketts, he grew warmly interested in the private life
and adventures of the nobility, for all of whom she entertained a most
catholic affection.

It was, indeed, a grand field-day for the peerage; even to the
"Pensioners" all were under arms. It was a review such as she rarely
enjoyed, and certainly she "improved the occasion." She scattered
about her noble personages with the profusion of a child strewing
wild-flowers. There were Dukes she had known from their cradles;
Marchionesses with whom she had disported in childhood; Earls and
Viscounts who had been her earliest playmates; not to speak of a more
advanced stage in her history, when all these distinguished individuals
were suppliants and suitors. To listen to her, you would swear that she
had never played shuttlecock with anything under an Earl, nor trundled
a hoop with aught below a Lord in Waiting! Norwood fooled her to the
top of her bent. To use his own phrase, "he left her easy hazards, and
everything on the balls." It is needless to state that, in such pleasant
converse, she had no memory for the noble Viscount's own transgressions.
He might have robbed the Exchequer, or stolen the Crown jewels, for
anything that she could recollect! and when, by a seeming accident, he
did allude to Newmarket, and lament his most "unlucky book," she smiled
complacently, as though to say that he could afford himself even the
luxury of being ruined, and not care for it.

"Florence is pretty much as it used to be, I suppose," said he; "and one
really needs one's friends to rebut and refute foolish rumors,