f it, won him. He began to feel
a sort of nibbling pleasure in her grotesque sketches of his person; a
tendency to recur to the old ones while dreading the arrival of new. You
hear old gentlemen speak fondly of the swish; and they are not attached
to pain, but the instrument revives their feeling of youth; and General
Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking, Lady Camper's foregone outlines of
him. For in the distance, the whip's-end may look like a clinging caress
instead of a stinging flick. But this craven melting in his heart was
rebuked by a very worthy pride, that flew for support to the injury she
had done to his devotions, and the offence to the sacred edifice. After
thinking over it, he decided that he must quit his residence; and as
it appeared to him in the light of duty, he, with an unspoken anguish,
commissioned the house-agent of his town to sell his lease or let the
house furnished, without further parley.

From the house-agent's shop he turned into the chemist's, for a tonic--a
foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough in the blow he
had just dealt himself, but he had been cogitating on tonics recently,
imagining certain valiant effects of them, with visions of a former
careless happiness that they were likely to restore. So he requested to
have the tonic strong, and he took one glass of it over the counter.

Fifteen minutes after the draught, he came in sight of his house, and
beholding it, he could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud
under Lady Camper's windows, his insurgency was of such violence. He
talked of it incessantly, but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was
looking pale, the reason why its modest merits touched him so. He longed
for the hour of his next dose, and for a caricature to follow, that he
might drink and defy it. A caricature was really due to him, he thought;
otherwise why had he abandoned his bijou dwelling? Lady Camper, however,
sent none. He had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that was
rather a likeness, and a handsome likeness, except as regarded a certain
disorderliness in his dress, which he knew to be very unlike him. Still
it despatched him to the looking-glass, to bring that verifier of
facts in evidence against the sketch. While sitting there he heard the
housemaid's knock at the door, and the strange intelligence that his
daughter was with Lady Camper, and had left word that she hoped he would
not forget his engagement to go to Mrs. Baerens' law