"I thoroughly approve, Harry," she said to me, "of your friend, Mr.
Hamilton. He is very well-informed and clever, and he doesn't allow
it to make him in the least disagreeable." And starting from this, he
was asked to dinner by, and invited to visit, a fair selection of
pleasant people.

Of the events which immediately succeeded his return to England I
can not, for two reasons, give a very detailed account. In the first
place, dealing as they do with living people, I have thought it
better, after consultation with the friends of both, to leave the
outlines of the story rather vague; and secondly, there are great
gaps and deficiencies in diaries and letters, which, though I believe
I can supply, knowing what I do of the circumstances, I hardly like
to fill in in a narrative of fact.

He took a dose, as I have already said, of the London season. "Those
six weeks," he said, "absolutely knocked me up; my friends told me,
among other things, that my physiognomy, being of a grave and gloomy
cast, was of a kind that was not suitable to a festive occasion; and
so I used to come home at night with my jaws positively aching with
the effort of a perpetually fatuous grin."

The following extract, which I have selected from one of his letters
of this period, will give a good picture of his mind:

"I think that two of the things that move me most, not to sadness nor
indignation, but to those vague tumultuous feelings for which we
have, I think, no name, but which were formerly called melancholy,
are these: