thirty-nine couples had dropped panting away, and till the youngest
Miss Gorgon, coming up to his partner, said in a loud hissing
scornful whisper, "Lucy, Mamma thinks you have danced quite enough
with this--this person." And Lucy, blushing, starting back, and
looking at Perkins in a very melancholy way, made him a little
curtsey, and went off to the Gorgonian party with her cousin.
Perkins was too frightened to lead her back to her place--too
frightened at first, and then too angry. "Person!" said he: his
soul swelled with a desperate republicanism: he went back to his
patron more of a Radical than ever.

He found that gentleman in the solitary tea-room, pacing up and down
before the observant landlady and handmaidens of the "Gorgon Arms,"
wiping his brows, gnawing his fingers--his ears looming over his
stiff white shirt-collar as red as fire. Once more the great man
seized John Perkins's hand as the latter came up.

"D----- the aristocrats!" roared the ex-follower of Squaretoes.

"And so say I! but what's the matter, sir?"

"What's the matter?--Why, that woman--that infernal, haughty,
straitlaced, cold-blooded brewer's daughter! I loved that woman,
sir--I KISSED that woman, sir, twenty years ago: we were all but
engaged, sir: we've walked for hours and hours, sir--us and the
governess--I've got a lock of her hair, sir, among my papers now;
and to-night, would you believe it?--as soon as she got to the
bottom of the set, away she went--not one word would she speak to me
all the way down: and when I wanted to lead her to her place, and
asked her if she would have a glass of negus, 'Sir,' says she, 'I