“‘To absquatulate, Lord Orville,’ said I, still pretending
     that I was looking for the books.

     “‘You are very quick about it,’ said he.

     “‘Guess it’s no great loss,’ I remarked, as cheerfully as I
     could.

     “‘You don’t think I’m chaffing?’ said Orville, with much
     emotion.

     “‘What has Mrs. Selwyn done with the books?’ I went on.

     “‘What, going’ said he, ’and going for good?  I wish I was
     such a good-plucked one as you, Miss Anville,’” &c.

The conversation, you perceive, might be easily written down to this key; and if the hero and heroine were modern, they would not be suffered to go through their dialogue on stilts, but would converse in the natural graceful way at present customary.  By the way, what a strange custom that is in modern lady novelists to make the men bully the women!  In the time of Miss Porter and Madame D’Arblay, we have respect, profound bows and curtsies, graceful courtesy, from men to women.  In the time of Miss Bronte, absolute rudeness.  Is it true, mesdames, that you like rudeness, and are pleased at being ill-used by men?  I could point to more than one lady novelist who so represents you.

Other people may not much like this extract, madam, from your favorite novel, but when you come to read it, you will like it.  I suspect that when you read that book which you so love, you read it a deux.  Did you not yourself pass a winter at Bath, when you were the belle of the assembly?  Was there not a Lord Orville in your case too?  As you think of him eleven lustres pass away.  You look at him with the bright eyes of those days, and your hero stands before you, the brave, the accomplished, the simple, the true gentleman; and he makes the most elegant of bows to one of the most beautiful young women the world ever saw; and he leads you out to the cotillon, to the dear unforgotten music.  Hark to the horns of Elfand, blowing, blowing!  Bonne vieille, you remember their melody, and your heart-strings thrill with it still.

Of your heroic heroes, I think our friend Monseigneur Athos, Count de la Fere, is my favorite.  I have read about him from sunrise to sunset with the utmost contentment of mind.  He has passed through how many volumes?  Forty?  Fifty?  I wish for my part there were a hundred more, and would never tire of him reselling prisoners, punishing ruffians, and running scoundrels through the midriff with his most graceful rapier.  Ah, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, you are a magnificent trio.  I think I like d’Artagnan in his own memoirs best.  I bought him years and years ago, price fivepence, in a little parchment-covered Cologne-printed volume, at a stall in Gray’s Inn Lane.  Dumas glorifies him and makes a Marshal of him; if I remember rightly, the original d’Artagnan was a needy adventurer, who died in exile very early in Louis XIV.’s reign.  Did you ever read the “Chevalier