of a bookish aristocracy that, though not so well worth having, and indeed in itself contemptible, is above the material and titular; one cannot quite say how.  There, however, is the flavour.  Dainty sauces are the life, the nobility, of famous dishes; taken alone, the former would be nauseating, the latter plebeian.  It is thus, or somewhat so, when you have a poet, still better a scholar, attached to your household.  Sir Willoughby deserved to have him, for he was above his county friends in his apprehension of the flavour bestowed by the man; and having him, he had made them conscious of their deficiency.  His cook, M. Dehors, pupil of the great Godefroy, was not the only French cook in the county; but his cousin and secretary, the rising scholar, the elegant essayist, was an unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of course.  Personally, we laugh at him; you had better not, unless you are fain to show that the higher world of polite literature is unknown to you.  Sir Willoughby could create an abject silence at a county dinner-table by an allusion to Vernon “at work at home upon his Etruscans or his Dorians”; and he paused a moment to let the allusion sink, laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric cousin, and let him rest.

In addition, Sir Willoughby abhorred the loss of a familiar face in his domestic circle.  He thought ill of servants who could accept their dismissal without petitioning to stay with him.  A servant that gave warning partook of a certain fiendishness.  Vernon’s project of leaving the Hall offended and alarmed the sensitive gentleman.  “I shall have to hand Letty Dale to him at last!” he thought, yielding in bitter generosity to the conditions imposed on him by the ungenerousness of another.  For, since his engagement to Miss Middleton, his electrically forethoughtful mind had seen in Miss Dale, if she stayed in the neighbourhood, and remained unmarried, the governess of his infant children, often consulting with him.  But here was a prospect dashed out.  The two, then, may marry, and live in a cottage on the borders of his park; and Vernon can retain his post, and Laetitia her devotion.  The risk of her casting it of had to be faced.  Marriage has been known to have such an effect on the most faithful of women that a great passion fades to naught in their volatile bosoms when they have taken a husband.  We see in women especially the triumph of the animal over the spiritual.  Nevertheless, risks must be run for a purpose in view.

Having no taste for a discussion with Vernon, whom it was his habit to confound by breaking away from him abruptly when he had delivered his opinion, he left it to both the persons interesting themselves in young Crossjay to imagine that he was meditating on the question of the lad, and to imagine that it would be wise to leave him to meditate; for he could be preternaturally acute in reading any of his fellow-creatures if they crossed the current of his feelings.  And, meanwhile, he instructed the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to bring Laetitia Dale on a visit to the Hall, where dinner-parties were soon to be given and a pleasing talker would be wanted, where also a woman of intellect, steeped in a splendid sentiment, hitherto a miracle of female constancy, might stir a younger woman to some emulation.  Definitely to resolve to bestow Laetitia upon Vernon was more than he could do; enough that he held the card.