“P.S.  I am to have a nice River Yacht.  Good-bye, Rip.  Mind you learn to box.  Mind you are not to show this to any of your friends on pain of my displeasure.

“N.B.  Lady B. was so angry when I told her that I had not come to her before.  She would do anything in the world for me.  I like her next best to my father and Austin.  Good-bye old Rip.”

Poor little Letitia, after three perusals of this ingenuous epistle, where the laws of punctuation were so disregarded, resigned it to one of the pockets of her brother Ripton’s best jacket, deeply smitten with the careless composer.  And so ended the last act of the Bakewell Comedy, in which the curtain closes with Sir Austin’s pointing out to his friends the beneficial action of the System in it from beginning to end.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

A style of affable omnipotence about the wise youth
After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship
Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes
An edge to his smile that cuts much like a sneer
Complacent languor of the wise youth
Huntress with few scruples and the game unguarded
It is no use trying to conceal anything from him
It was his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach
Minutes taken up by the grey puffs from their mouths
No!  Gentlemen don’t fling stones; leave that to the blackguards
Our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms
Rogue on the tremble of detection
Rumour for the nonce had a stronger spice of truth than usual
She can make puddens and pies
The born preacher we feel instinctively to be our foe
There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness
Those days of intellectual coxcombry
Troublesome appendages of success
Wisdom goes by majorities
Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man