To the last he resented offers of intimacy from those whom he considered
his inferiors, and as there are ladies enough everywhere, he had ample
opportunity for administering rebuke to those who pressed into his
society. On one occasion he was sauntering with a friend at Caen under
the window of a lady who longed for nothing more than to have the great
_arbiter elegantiarum_ at her house. When seeing him beneath, she put
her head out, and called out to him, 'Good evening, Mr. Brummell, won't
you come up and take tea?' The Beau looked up with extreme severity
expressed on his face, and replied, 'Madam, you take medicine--you take
a walk--you take a liberty--but you _drink_ tea,' and walked on, having,
it may be hoped, cured the lady of her admiration.

In the life of such a man there could not of course be much striking
incident. He lived for 'society,' and the whole of his story consists in
his rise and fall in that narrow world. Though admired and sought after
by the women--so much so that at his death his chief assets were locks
of hair, the only things he could not have turned into money--he never
married. Wedlock might have sobered him, and made him a more sensible,
if not more respectable member of society, but his advances towards
matrimony never brought him to the crisis. He accounted for one
rejection in his usual way. 'What could I do, my dear _fellar_,' he
lisped, 'when I actually saw Lady Mary eat cabbage?' At another time he
is said to have induced some deluded young creature to elope with him
from a ball-room, but managed the affair so ill, that the lovers (?)
were caught in the next street, and the affair came to an end. He wrote
rather ecstatic love-letters to Lady Marys and Miss ----s, gave married
ladies advice on the treatment of their spouses and was tender to
various widows, but though he went on in this way through life, he was
never, it would seem, in love, from the mere fact that he was incapable
of passion.