‘Let us do it now!’
‘He is not here, otherwise——One dislikes a spooney to be successful.’
‘Where are our friends?’
‘Annesley with the Duchess, and Squib with the Duke at écarté.’
‘Success attend them both!’
‘Amen!’
CHAPTER IV.
Innocence and Experience
TO FEEL that the possessions of an illustrious ancestry are about to slide from out your line for ever; that the numerous tenantry, who look up to you with the confiding eye that the most liberal parvenu cannot attract, will not count you among their lords; that the proud park, filled with the ancient and toppling trees that your fathers planted, will yield neither its glory nor its treasures to your seed, and that the old gallery, whose walls are hung with pictures more cherished than the collections of kings, will not breathe with your long posterity; all these are feelings sad and trying, and are among those daily pangs which moralists have forgotten in their catalogue of miseries, but which do not the less wear out those heart-strings at which they are so constantly tugging.