he very thick with Jerrold?"

"Oh, yes, rather. Jerrold entertains him a good deal."

"Which is returned with compound interest, I'll bet you. Mr. Jerrold
simply makes a convenience of him. He won't make love to his sister,
because the poor, rich, unsophisticated girl is as ugly as she is
ubiquitous. His majesty is fastidious, you see, and seeks only the
caress of beauty, and while he lives there at the Suttons' when he goes
to town, and dines and sleeps and smokes and wines there, and uses their
box at the opera-house, and is courted and flattered by the old lady
because dear Cubby worships the ground he walks on and poor Fanny Sutton
thinks him adorable, he turns his back on the girl at every dance
because she _can't_ dance, and leaves her to you fellows who have a
conscience and some idea of decency. He gives all _his_ devotions to
Nina Beaubien, who dances like a _coryphée_, and drops _her_ when Alice
Renwick comes with her glowing Spanish beauty. Oh, damn it, I'm an old
fool to get worked up over it as I do, but you young fellows don't see
what I see. You haven't seen what I've seen; and pray God you never may!
That's where the shoe pinches, Rollins. It is what he _reminds_ me
of--not so much what he _is_, I suppose--that I get rabid about. He is
for all the world like a man we had in the old regiment when you were in
swaddling-clothes; and I never look at Mamie Gray's sad, white face that
it doesn't bring back a girl I knew just then whose heart was broken by
just such a shallow, selfish, adorable scoun--No, I won't use _that_
word in speaking of Jerrold; but it's what I fear. Rollins, you call him
generous. Well, so he is,--_lavish_, if you like, with his money and his
hospitality here in the post. Money comes easily to him, and goes; but
you boys misuse the term. _I_ call him selfish to the core, because he
can deny himself no luxury, no pleasure, though it may wring a woman's