reckoned very revolutionary and Jacobin not to wear a good deal of it. My
lady hardly liked the opinions of any man who wore his own hair; but this
she would say was rather a prejudice: only in her youth none but the mob
had gone wigless, and she could not get over the association of wigs with
birth and breeding; a man's own hair with that class of people who had
formed the rioters in seventeen hundred and eighty, when Lord George
Gordon had been one of the bugbears of my lady's life. Her husband and
his brothers, she told us, had been put into breeches, and had their
heads shaved on their seventh birthday, each of them; a handsome little
wig of the newest fashion forming the old Lady Ludlow's invariable
birthday present to her sons as they each arrived at that age; and
afterwards, to the day of their death, they never saw their own hair. To
be without powder, as some underbred people were talking of being now,
was in fact to insult the proprieties of life, by being undressed. It
was English sans-culottism. But Mr. Gray did wear a little powder,
enough to save him in my lady's good opinion; but not enough to make her
approve of him decidedly.

The next time I saw him was in the great hall. Mary Mason and I were
going to drive out with my lady in her coach, and when we went down
stairs with our best hats and cloaks on, we found Mr. Gray awaiting my
lady's coming. I believe he had paid his respects to her before, but we
had never seen him; and he had declined her invitation to spend Sunday
evening at the Court (as Mr. Mountford used to do pretty regularly--and
play a game at picquet too--), which, Mrs. Medlicott told us, had caused
my lady to be not over well pleased with him.

He blushed redder than ever at the sight of us, as we entered the hall
and dropped him our curtsies. He coughed two or three times, as if he
would have liked to speak to us, if he could but have found something to