able
how any woman of common intellect could listen to such egregious
nonsense, and yet I could not disguise from myself the consciousness of
the fact, that Miss Bogle rather liked it than otherwise.

Roper had another prodigious advantage over me. Edith was fond of
riding, an exercise to which, from my earliest years, I have had the
utmost abhorrence. I am not, I believe, constitutionally timid, and yet
I do not know almost any ordeal which I would not cheerfully undergo, to
save me from the necessity of passing along a stable behind the heels of
half-a-dozen stationary horses. Who knows at what moment the concealed
demon may be awaked within them? They are always either neighing, or
pulling at their halters, or stamping, or whisking their tails, in a
manner which is absolutely frightful; and it is impossible to predict
the exact moment they may select for lashing out, and, it may be,
scattering your brains by the force of a hoof most murderously shod
with half a hundredweight of iron. The descent of Hercules to Hades
seems to me a feat of mere insignificance compared with the cleaning out
of the Augean stables, if, as I presume, the inmates were not previously
removed.

Roper, on the contrary, rode like a Centaur, or the late Ducrow. He had
several brutes, on one or other of which you might see him every
afternoon prancing along Princes Street, and he presently contrived to
make himself the constant companion of Edith in his daily rides. What
took place on these occasions, of course I do not know. It was, however,
quite clear to me, that the sooner this sort of thing was put an end to
the better; nor should I have cared one farthing had a civil war broke
out, if that event could have insured to me the everlasting absence of
the pert and pestilential dragoon.

In this dilemma I resolved to make a confidante of my cousin Mary
Muggerland. Mary and I were the best possible friends, having flirted
together for five successive seasons, with intermissions, on a sort of
general understanding that nothing serious was meant, and that either
party was at liberty at any time to cry off in case of an extraneous
attachment. She listened to the history of my sorrows with infinite
complacency.

"I am afraid, George," she said, "that you have no chance whatever; I
know Edith well, and have heard her say, twenty times over, that she
never will marry any man unless he belongs to the army."

"Then I have been exceedingly ill-used!"