who had to pioneer young gentlemen through their Horace and their Tully
for his bed and board? When you meet him, Harry Boyce was happy in having
caught for his pupil a young fellow who had not merely money but brains,
and so sublime a condescension that Harry was not sent away from table
with the parson when the puddings came. Mr. Geoffrey Waverton was pleased
to have a value for him, and defended him from his natural duty of being
gentleman usher to Lady Waverton. So, Mr. Waverton having taken horse,
Harry was free to go walking.

It was late in a wet autumn, and all the clay of Middlesex slippery as
butter and, withal, affectionate as warm glue. Harry kept to the highway.
Though its miles of mud and water were, on the surface, even worse than
the too green meadows or the gleaming brown furrows of plough land, a
careful man could count upon its letting him go no further than knee
deep. When he came to Whetstone, Harry's feet were brown, shapeless,
weighty masses, but he had not lost either shoe, and he was still in
hopes of reaching Barnet and a pint of small beer before it was time to
struggle back. At the worst a dry throat and wet legs were a cheap price
for escaping the voice of Lady Waverton, who, in the afternoons, read the
romances of Mlle. de Scudery aloud.

He could see the tufts of smoke above Barnet and its church on the
hill-top. He was winding down to the bottom of the valley from which that
hill rises, when eloquence arrested him. He may at other times have heard
profanity as copious, but never profanity so vehement or at such speed.
The orator was a woman.

Harry stood to listen with critical admiration. Madame mixed the ugly and
the pleasant rarely; she made a charming grotesque. Her mind was very far
from nice and provided her with amazing images; but she had a pretty,