returned all outlay in the respect and consideration
they brought with them—obtaining, as
it were, free tickets to all social exhibitions. So
with select companions and selecter tastes; and
Charles Hungerford became an eager catechumen
in this faith, and almost a raging little
fanatic.

Thornton Fermor, Esq., had only a genteel
patrimony, and as Alicia Mary, Blanche, and
Laura junior, as well as Charles Hungerford,
were encouraged in the same virtues, their
combined outlay became a serious total.
Charles Hungerford was sent, not so much
to a fashionable school, as to a fashionable
set at the fashionable school. Till he was
twenty he sat in a private box everywhere. So
with Alicia Mary, and Blanche, and Laura
junior, who, before they had passed through
a beginning, or even a middle stage, were
put to a " finishing school," where they were
drilled and smoothed and burnished up to an
exquisite smoothness. Lady Laura, taking
stock of her labours and good deeds, often said
that she had at least given them the best
education " that money could procure," which really
meant no more than that they had been " well
grounded" in the best juvenile society that
could be found. She herself was a wonderful
captain and she-lanzknecht, a drawing-room Frei
Ritter, and with her curious gauntness and
pale mustard complexion, seemed not to care
either for eating or drinking, or, above all, for
sleep. What she found in the hard, hopeless
sort of life she lived, and which she called
"gaiety," would be difficult to discover.

Thornton Fermor was a sort of quiet woman
in a man's dress, and received orders from her.
She had settled that Charles Hungerford, who
had been at Oxford studying young Lord
Chester and Sir Victor Banbury, and other
young gentlemen of quality, should be " put"
into a Guards' regiment, when Thornton Fermor
glided away out of the world just as he
used to glide away of an evening out of his
home racket to a tranquil club—but leaving
his affairs, as friends told each other, " in sad
confusion." This brought about a lull in the
racket. A huddled hasty settlement of things
was effected. Charley Fermor had to "go"
into a corps where there were no youths of
quality, but only the sons of thriving merchants;
where the senior captain was the second child
of the well-known Manchester horse repositee;
where the adjutant was understood to take
largely under the will of an eminent wedding
pastrycook; and where some of the junior
ensigns bore names that awkwardly and pointedly
suggested brewing, cotton-spinning, and colonial
produce.

Finally, Alicia, showing symptoms of " weakness
of the chest," Lady Laura Fermor broke up
her camp, loaded her baggage-carts, and marched
for Nice; whence very soon was written home
news of " Alicia's chest being restored."

It was hard not to admire the boldness, the
energy, the unflagging spirit, of this untiring
woman. If she had ever thought of the
unimportant little matter of making a soul, or could
have spared any time for that kind of
délassement, she would have held a high spiritual
place. She worked out a fashionable salvation
with infinite mortification of the flesh, and all
manner of painful austerities in the narrow and
thorny paths of social pleasures. Poor soul!
Did she ever smile when she heard the select
preacher at the select church she attended,
declaiming against what he called the "alluring
seductions" of the world?

At her time of life, a lawyer, a merchant, a
soldier, who had seen such service as she had
seen, would think of honourable retirement.
The soldier, spent and battered, might honourably
retire to his Chelsea or his Invalides; she
was entitled to her pension, her seat in the sun,
and, figuratively, her tranquil pipe. She might
gossip with other veteran dowagers, also in
honourable "retreat." But this undaunted
woman was only thinking of new fields and new
campaigns. She found strength, and spirit,
and courage, and endurance, for the new
venture: but where she got them it would be hard
to say.

Yet she worked under grave discouragement.
Alicia Mary, Blanche, and Laura, with remarkable
promise as children, did not answer early
expectation. In all of them there was a
tendency to inherited gauntness. In all of them
there was a tendency to a plebeian broadness of
features often associated with scrubbing of
door-steps, and attendance on many lodgers.
Late bivouacking and exposure had told roughly
on Alicia Mary and her sisters. Their mother
did what she could with them—almost tried to
reconstruct them altogether. She might dress
them with costliness and the best taste, of which
she had abundance, and she might turn on
perfect conduits of porter and port and "nourishing"
stimulants; she might push and twist
them untiringly, wearily drilling them: it would
not do, and could not be done. Could she fill
in the hollow gaps in their necks and shoulders,
and pare off those sharpnesses which projected
like chimney-piece corners, she would have had
more than mortal skill. No wonder that
Captain Singleman, in his coarse way, said of the
young ladies they were a " hopeless lot."

Still she persevered, and by never relaxing
her efforts, by ceaseless training, by dressing
them well, by talking of them as superiors,
and filling the air round them as they marched
with the sound of the Stonehewers and other
family titles, like Turkish music, and, above all,
by hurrying up when she saw them broken, and
making them form square, she managed to secure
for them a place and a sort of false prestige.
Thus they were always led out to the dance, and
never looked on sadly at the whirling measure,
like deserted drawing-room Calypsos.

At Nice, things looked brighter. There was
what her ladyship called an opening—a destitution
in the matter of good serviceable girls.
Unsound chests, "affected" lungs, and consumption,
went out to parties, and, with flushed cheeks,
were ready to stand up and go through the