Ah!  Gyneth and Ida, peerless queens of beauty, it was exciting, doubtless, to gaze down from your velveted gallery on the mad tilting below, to see ever and anon through the yellow dust a kind, handsome face looking up at you, pale but scarcely reproachful, just before the horse-hoofs trod it down; ah! fairest Ninons and Dianas—­prizes that, like the Whip at Newmarket, were always to be challenged for—­you were proud when your reckless lover came to woo, with the blood of last night’s favorite not dry on his blade; but what were your fatal honors compared to those of a reigning toast in the rough, ancient days?  The demigods and heroes that were suitors did not stand upon trifles, and the contest often ended in the extermination of all the lady’s male relatives to the third and fourth generation.  People then took it quite as a matter of course—­rather a credit to the family than otherwise.

Guy and I discussed, often and gravely, the relative merits of Evadne the violet-haired, Helen, Cleopatra, and a hundred others, just as, on the steps of White’s, or in the smoking-room at the “Rag,” men compare the points of the debutantes of the season.

His knowledge of feminine psychology—­it must have been theoretical, for he was not seventeen—­implied a study and depth of research that was quite surprising; but I am bound to state that his estimate of the strength of character and principle inherent in the weaker sex was any thing but high; nearly, indeed, identical with that formed by the learned lady who, to the question, “Did she think the virtue of any single one of her sisterhood impregnable?” replied “C’est selon.”  He often used to astonish my weak mind by his observations on this head.  I did not know till afterward that Sir Henry Fallowfield, the Bassompierre of his day, came for the Christmas pheasant-shooting every year into Guy’s neighborhood, and that he had already imbibed lessons of questionable morality, sitting at the gouty feet of that evil Gamaliel.

He spoke of and to women of every class readily whenever he got the chance, always with perfect aplomb and self-possession; and I have heard older men remark since, that in him it did not appear the precocity of “the rising generation,” but rather the confidence of one who knew his subject well.  Perhaps the fact of his father having died when he was an infant, and his having always been suzerain among his women at home, may have had something to do with this.  An absurd instance of what I have been saying happened just before Guy left.

By time-honored custom, four or five of the Sixth were invited every week to dine with the head master.  They were not, strictly speaking, convivial, those solemn banquets; where the host was condescendingly affable, and his guests cheerful, as it were, under protest; resembling somewhat the entertainments in the captain’s cabin, where the chief is unpopular.