And with whom do you think I had the honour to dance?  With no less a person than Lady Jane Preston; who, it appears, had not gone out of town, and who shook me most kindly by the hand when she saw me, and asked me to dance with her.  We had my Lord Tiptoff and Lady Fanny Rakes for our vis-a-vis.

You should have seen how the people crowded to look at us, and admired my dancing too, for I cut the very best of capers, quite different to the rest of the gents (my Lord among the number), who walked through the quadrille as if they thought it a trouble, and stared at my activity with all their might.  But when I have a dance I like to enjoy myself:  and Mary Smith often said I was the very best partner at our assemblies.  While we were dancing, I told Lady Jane how Roundhand, Gutch, and I, had come down three in a cab, besides the driver; and my account of our adventures made her Ladyship laugh, I warrant you.  Lucky it was for me that I didn’t go back in the same vehicle; for the driver went and intoxicated himself at the “Yellow Lion,” threw out Gutch and our head clerk as he was driving them back, and actually fought Gutch afterwards and blacked his eye, because he said that Gutch’s red waistcoat frightened the horse.

Lady Jane, however, spared me such an uncomfortable ride home:  for she said she had a fourth place in her carriage, and asked me if I would accept it; and positively, at two o’clock in the morning, there was I, after setting the ladies and my Lord down, driven to Salisbury Square in a great thundering carriage, with flaming lamps and two tall footmen, who nearly knocked the door and the whole little street down with the noise they made at the rapper.  You should have seen Gus’s head peeping out of window in his white nightcap!  He kept me up the whole night telling him about the ball, and the great people I had seen there; and next day he told at the office my stories, with his own usual embroideries upon them.

“Mr. Titmarsh,” said Lady Fanny, laughing to me, “who is that great fat curious man, the master of the house?  Do you know he asked me if you were not related to us? and I said, ‘Oh, yes, you were.’”

“Fanny!” says Lady Jane.

“Well,” answered the other, “did not Grandmamma say Mr. Titmarsh was her cousin?”

“But you know that Grandmamma’s memory is not very good.”

“Indeed, you’re wrong, Lady Jane,” says my Lord; “I think it’s prodigious.”

“Yes, but not very—­not very accurate.”

“No, my Lady,” says I; “for her Ladyship, the Countess of Drum, said, if you remember, that my friend Gus Hoskins—­”

“Whose cause you supported so bravely,” cries Lady Fanny.

“—­That my friend Gus is her Ladyship’s cousin too, which cannot be, for I know all his family:  they live in Skinner Street and St. Mary Axe, and are not—­not quite so respectable as my relatives.”

At this they all began to laugh; and my Lord said, rather haughtily—­