nd perfumes; his
own smart, impudent, French valet; his own travelling bookcase of French
novels, which he opened with his own golden key. He drank nothing but
chocolate in the morning; he had long interviews with the cook, and
revolutionized our dinner table. All the French newspapers were sent to
him by a London agent. He altered the arrangements of his bed-room; no
servant but his own valet was permitted to enter it. Family portraits
that hung there, were turned to the walls, and portraits of French
actresses and Italian singers were stuck to the back of the canvasses.
Then he displaced a beautiful little ebony cabinet which had been in the
family three hundred years; and set up in its stead a Cyprian temple of
his own, in miniature, with crystal doors, behind which hung locks
of hair, rings, notes written on blush-coloured paper, and other
love-tokens kept as sentimental relics. His influence became
all-pervading among us. He seemed to communicate to the house the change
that had taken place in himself, from the reckless, racketty young
Englishman to the super-exquisite foreign dandy. It was as if the
fiery, effervescent atmosphere of the Boulevards of Paris had insolently
penetrated into the old English mansion, and ruffled and infected its
quiet native air, to the remotest corners of the place.

My father was even more dismayed than displeased by the alteration in
my brother's habits and manners--the eldest son was now farther from
his ideal of what an eldest son should be, than ever. As for friends and
neighbours, Ralph was heartily feared and disliked by them, before
he had been in the house a week. He had an ironically patient way of
listening to their conversation; an ironically respectful manner of
demolishing their old-fashioned opinions, and correcting their slightest
mistakes, which secretly aggravated them beyond endurance. It was worse
still, when my father, in despair, tried to tempt him into marriage,
as the one final chance of working his reform; and invited half the
marriageable young ladies of our acquaintance to the house, for his
especial benefit.

Ralph had never shown much fondness at home, for the refinements of
good female society. Abroad, he had lived as exclusively as he possibly
could, among women whose characters ranged downwards by infinitesimal
degrees, from the mysteriously doubtful to the notoriously bad. The
highly-bred, highly-refined, highly-accomplished young English beauties
had