ye--perhaps no great loss to
the aggregate loveliness of the universe--for one of his invitations
to 999 Cavendish Street south-east, with the chance of being presented
to the Duchess of Lyonesse.

To do Elsley justice, one reason why he liked his new acquaintances so
well was, that they liked him. He behaved well himself, and therefore
people behaved well to him. He was, as I have said, a very handsome
fellow in his way; therefore it was easy to him, as it is to all
physically beautiful persons, to acquire a graceful manner. Moreover,
he had steeped his whole soul in old poetry, and especially in
Spenser's Faery Queen. Good for him, had he followed every lesson
which he might have learnt out of that most noble of English books:
but one lesson at least he learnt from it; and that was, to be
chivalrous, tender, and courteous to all women, however old or ugly,
simply because they were women. The Hatchgoose Pythonesses did not
wish to be women, but very bad imitations of men; and therefore he
considered himself absolved from all knightly duties toward them: but
toward these Peris of the west, and to the dowagers who had been Peris
in their time, what adoration could be too great? So he bowed down
and worshipped; and, on the whole, he was quite right in so doing.
Moreover, he had the good sense to discover, that though the young
Peris were the prettiest to look at, the elder Peris were the better
company; and that it is, in general, from married women that a poet or
any one else will ever learn what woman's heart is like. And so well
did he carry out his creed, that before his first summer was over he
had quite captivated the heart of old Lady Knockdown, aunt to Lucia
St. Just, and wife to Lucia's guardian; a charming old Irishwoman, who
affected a pretty brogue, perhaps for the same reason that she wore a
wig, and who had been, in her day, a beauty and a blue, a friend
of the Miss Berrys, and Tommy Moore, and Grattan, and Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, and Dan O'Connell, and all other lions and lionesses which
had roared for the last sixty years about the Emerald Isle. There was
no one whom she did not know, and nothing she could not talk about.
Married up, when a girl, to a man for whom she did not care, and
having no children, she had indemnified herself by many flirtations,
and the writing of two or three novels, in which she penned on paper
the superfluous feeling which had no vent in real life. She had
deserted, as she grew