Mr. Philip Withers was the very man for the looser principles of Hendrik,—­a fine gentleman’s fine son, and his only one, who, by the death of his father, had come, whilst he was yet very young, into a pretty property in the neighborhood,—­a sort of idyllic man of the world, with considerable cleverness, a neat miscellaneous education, handsome person, effective clothes, plausible address, mischievous brilliancy of versatile talk, a deep voice, two or three accomplishments best adapted to the atmosphere of sentimental women, graceful self-possession, small feet, nice hands, striking attitudes, a subduing smile, magnetic whisper, Machiavellian tact, and French morals.  He could sing you into tears, and dance you into love, and talk you into wonder; when he drew, you begged for his portrait by himself, and when he wrote, you solicited his autograph.

Mr. Philip Withers had taken his moustache to foreign parts, and done the Continent sophisticatedly.  He was well-read in cities, and had brought home a budget of light, popular, and profusely illustrated articles of talk on an equivocal variety of urban life, which he prettily distributed among clovery pastorals, Wordsworthian ballads, De Coverly entertainments, Crayon sketches, and Sparrowgrass Papers, for the benefit of his country subscribers.  From all of which you have no doubt gathered by this time that Mr. Philip Withers was a graceful scamp, and a friend of the Splurges,—­who had money, which Mr. Philip Withers had not; for he had been a munificent patron of elegant pleasures abroad, and since his return had erected an addition to his father’s house in the shape of a pair of handsome mortgages, as a proprietor of romantic tastes in architecture might flank his front door with mediaeval donjons.

Mrs. Marmaduke made much of that good-looking and delightful Withers.  Though not a pious man, in the formal sense of the term, she felt sure he was religious according to that stained-glass and fragrant religion of the tastes which is an essential attribute of every gentleman,—­that is, of every well-born man of cultivated preferences and sensitive antipathies,—­and she had no doubt that gentlemen’s souls could be saved by that arrangement just as satisfactorily, and so much more gracefully.  She only wished, my dear, you could hear Mr. Withers express himself on those subjects,—­his ideas were so delightfully “your deal, my love”—­clear, his illustrations so sweetly pretty, and his manner so earnest; really, he stirred her like—­“hearts, did you say?—­a trump.”

Josephine Splurge contented herself with letting down her back hair for Mr. Withers and making eyes at him.

“Good-morrow to the guileless Genevieve!”—­Withers delighted in dispensing equivocal nothings to the dowdy Muse of the sofa and back hair.—­“Charming weather!”

“There, you bewildering Joseph Surface, you need not go on,—­I know what you are going to say, and I will neither be flattered nor fascinated.  Come, confess now, like a dear candid creature, throw off your irresistibly bewitching mask, and own that your sentiments are all rhetoric.”