these gentlemen--on the contrary, they were cordially deferential. I
felt that he was encompassed by undoubted gentlemen, and my warmer
feelings to my father returned when I became sensible of the pleasant
sway he held over the circle, both in speaking and listening. His
sympathetic smile and semi-droop of attention; his readiness, when
occasion demanded it, to hit the key of the subject and help it on with
the right word; his air of unobtrusive appreciation; his sensibility to
the moment when the run of conversation depended upon him--showed
inimitable art coming of natural genius; and he did not lose a shade of
his superior manner the while. Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn, professionally
voluble, a lively talker, brimming with anecdote, but too sparkling,
too prompt, too full of personal relish of his point, threw my father's
urbane supremacy into marked relief; and so in another fashion did the
Earl of Witlington, 'a youth in the season of guffaws,' as Jorian DeWitt
described him, whom a jest would seize by the throat, shaking his sapling
frame. Jorian strolled up to us goutily. No efforts of my father's
would induce him to illustrate his fame for repartee, so it remained
established. 'Very pretty waxwork,' he said to me of our English
beauties swimming by. 'Now, those women, young Richmond, if they were
inflammable to the fiftieth degree, that is, if they had the fiftieth
part of a Frenchwoman in them, would have canvassed society on the great
man's account long before this, and sent him to the top like a bubble.
He wastes his time on them. That fat woman he's bowing to is Viscountess
Sedley, a porcine empress, widow of three, with a soupcon of bigamy to
flavour them. She mounted from a grocer's shop, I am told. Constitution
has done everything for that woman. So it will everywhere--it beats the
world! Now he's on all-fours to Lady Rachel Stokes, our pure
aristocracy; she walks as if she were going through a doorway, and
couldn't risk an eyelid. I 'd like to see her tempting St. Anthony.
That's little Wreckham's wife: she's had as many adventures as Gil Blas