g, among many kisses, which had been bestowed by
"the girl he loved best?" As if he loved any of them! These pert and
blowsy schoolgirls, with hideous voices, and arrogant curls, or
crimped lion-manes of aggressive hair! He, with "his heart set all
upon a snowy coif!" (as he chose to wrest Mr. Yeats' line to his own
purposes).

It was singular in how many of these exercises, of which the greater
number included kissing, he found himself involved with Tishy Mangan.
Tishy was in a bad temper. The red-headed medical student had not been
honoured with an invitation. Dr. Mangan had struck his name from the
list of guests saying that they had enough without him, and Tishy knew
her father too well to protest. Dr. Mangan was in the habit of saying
that he always left all household affairs "in the hands of the
ladies." He did not add, as he might have done, that these hands lay
within his, and that their owners had long since realised that it was
advisable to respond to any indication of pressure. His daughter,
however, while she submitted to the inevitable, saw no reason why she
should deny herself the solace of sulking, nor of avenging herself of
his tyranny on "his fine pet," as she, in high indignation, described
Larry to herself. Master Coppinger might be a man of property and the
owner of Coppinger's Court, yes, or Dublin Castle, for all she cared!
Pappy might say what he liked, but _she_ wouldn't be bothered
with a boy like that! And there was Ned Cloherty--(this was the
medical student)--that she had as good as asked to come--and what
could she say to him now, she wondered? So Tishy sulked, and resented
the Hidden Hand, that so inevitably linked her with the owner of
Coppinger's Court, as much as did that man of property himself.

The evening wore on; with romping, with screaming, with enormous
consumption of various foods, and with an ever-heightening
temperature, that was specially noticeable among those seniors who had
not disdained the brew of punch that had coincided with the
announcement of midnight, made, with maddening deliberation, by Mrs.
Mangan's cuckoo-clock. The usual delirium of cracker-head-dresses had
befallen the company. Larry, decorated with a dunce's cap, placed upon
his yellow head by a jovial matron, found himself fated, by a final
effort of penalising fancy on the part of another matron, to select "a
young lady," to conduct her to the topmost step of the staircase, and
there, on his knees, to kis