m, and Madeline snubbed them, and Mrs. Marmaduke pumped them, and
the combined family confounded them. Only Mr. Philip Withers was the
intimate and encouraged _habitue_ of the house.

Mr. Philip Withers was the very man for the looser principles of
Hendrik,--a fine gentleman's fine son, and his only one, who, by the
death of his father, had come, whilst he was yet very young, into a
pretty property in the neighborhood,--a sort of idyllic man of the
world, with considerable cleverness, a neat miscellaneous education,
handsome person, effective clothes, plausible address, mischievous
brilliancy of versatile talk, a deep voice, two or three
accomplishments best adapted to the atmosphere of sentimental women,
graceful self-possession, small feet, nice hands, striking attitudes, a
subduing smile, magnetic whisper, Machiavellian tact, and French
morals. He could sing you into tears, and dance you into love, and talk
you into wonder; when he drew, you begged for his portrait by himself,
and when he wrote, you solicited his autograph.

Mr. Philip Withers had taken his moustache to foreign parts, and done
the Continent sophisticatedly. He was well-read in cities, and had
brought home a budget of light, popular, and profusely illustrated
articles of talk on an equivocal variety of urban life, which he
prettily distributed among clovery pastorals, Wordsworthian ballads, De
Coverly entertainments, Crayon sketches, and Sparrowgrass Papers, for
the benefit of his country subscribers. From all of which you have no
doubt gathered by this time that Mr. Philip Withers was a graceful
scamp, and a friend of the Splurges,--who had money, which Mr. Philip
Withers had not; for he had been a munificent patron of elegant
pleasures abroad, and since his return had erected an addition to his
father's house in the shape of a pair of handsome mortgages, as a
proprietor of romantic tastes in architecture might flank his front
door with mediaeval donjons.

Mrs. Marmaduke made much of that good-looking and delightful Withers.
Though not a pious man, in the formal sense of the term, she felt sure
he was religious according to that stained-glass and fragrant religion
of the tastes which is an essential attribute of every gentleman,--that
is, of every well-born man of cultivated preferences and sensitive
antipathies,--and she had no doubt that gentlemen's souls could be
saved by that arrangement just as satisfactorily, and so much more
gracefully. She