r of a Club for the promotion
of nausea. Is he happy? you ask. As much so as one who has had the
misfortune to obtain what he wanted can be. Speed is his passion. He
races from point to point. In emulation of Leander and Don Juan,
he swam, I hear, to the opposite shores the other day, or some
world-shaking feat of the sort: himself the Hero whom he went to meet:
or, as they who pun say, his Hero was a Bet. A pretty little domestic
episode occurred this morning. He finds her abstracted in the fire of
his caresses: she turns shy and seeks solitude: green jealousy takes
hold of him: he lies in wait, and discovers her with his new rival--a
veteran edition of the culinary Doctor! Blind to the Doctor's great
national services, deaf to her wild music, he grasps the intruder,
dismembers him, and performs upon him the treatment he has recommended
for dressed cucumber. Tears and shrieks accompany the descent of the
gastronome. Down she rushes to secure the cherished fragments: he
follows: they find him, true to his character, alighted and straggling
over a bed of blooming flowers. Yet ere a fairer flower can gather him,
a heel black as Pluto stamps him into earth, flowers and all:--happy
burial! Pathetic tribute to his merit is watering his grave, when by
saunters my Lord Mountfalcon. 'What's the mattah?' says his lordship,
soothing his moustache. They break apart, and 'tis left to me to explain
from the window. My lord looks shocked, Richard is angry with her for
having to be ashamed of himself, Beauty dries her eyes, and after a
pause of general foolishness, the business of life is resumed. I may add
that the Doctor has just been dug up, and we are busy, in the enemy's
absence, renewing old Aeson with enchanted threads. By the way, a Papist
priest has blest them."

A month had passed when Adrian wrote this letter. He was very
comfortable; so of course he thought Time was doing his duty. Not a word
did he say of Richard's return, and for some reason or other neither
Richard nor Lucy spoke of it now.

Lady Blandish wrote back: "His father thinks he has refused to come to
him. By your utter silence on the subject, I fear that it must be so.
Make him come. Bring him by force. Insist on his coming. Is he mad? He
must come at once."

To this Adrian replied, after a contemplative comfortable lapse of a day
or two, which might be laid to his efforts to adopt the lady's advice,
"The point is that the half man declines to come without