for a cluster of gentlemen hung round him; and I had
presently to bow to greetings which were rather of a kind to flatter me,
leading me to presume that he was respected as well as marvelled at. The
names of Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn, Mr. Jennings, Lord Alton, Sir Weeton
Slater, Mr. Monterez Williams, Admiral Loftus, the Earl of Witlington,
were among those which struck my ear, and struck me as good ones. I could
not perceive anything of the air of cynical satellites in 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