“Undoubtedly.”

“We retire and retire,” Adela remarked.  “We waste the royal forces.  But, dear me, that makes us insurgents!”

She laughed, being slightly frivolous.  Her elders had the proper sentimental worship of youth and its supposed quality of innocence, and caressed her.

At the ringing of the second dinner-bell, Mr. Pole ran to the foot of the stairs and shouted for Arabella, who returned no answer, and was late in her appearance at table.  Grace concluded, Mr. Pole said, “Letter gone?  I wanted to see it, you know.”

“It was as well not, papa,” Arabella replied.

Mr. Pole shook his head seriously.  The ladies were thankful for the presence of Mr. Barrett.  And lo! this man was in perfect evening uniform.  He looked as gentlemanly a visitor as one might wish to see.  There was no trace of the poor organist.  Poverty seemed rather a gold-edge to his tail-coat than a rebuke to it; just as, contrariwise, great wealth is, to the imagination, really set off by a careless costume.  One need not explain how the mind acts in such cases:  the fact, as I have put it, is indisputable.  And let the young men of our generation mark the present chapter, that they may know the virtue residing in a tail-coat, and cling to it, whether buffeted by the waves, or burnt out by the fire, of evil angry fortune.  His tail-coat safe, the youthful Briton is always ready for any change in the mind of the moody Goddess.  And it is an almost certain thing that, presuming her to have a damsel of condition in view for him as a compensation for the slaps he has received, he must lose her, he cannot enter a mutual path with her, if he shall have failed to retain this article of a black tail, his social passport.  I mean of course that he retain respect for the article in question.  Respect for it firmly seated in his mind, the tail may be said to be always handy.  It is fortune’s uniform in Britain:  the candlestick, if I may dare to say so, to the candle; nor need any young islander despair of getting to himself her best gifts, while he has her uniform at command, as glossy as may be.

The ladies of Brookfield were really stormed by Mr. Barrett’s elegant tail.  When, the first glass of wine nodded over, Mr. Pole continued the discourse of the morning, with allusions to French cooks, and his cook, their sympathies were taken captive by Mr. Barrett’s tact:  the door to their sympathies having been opened to him as it were by his attire.  They could not guess what necessity urged Mr. Pole to assert his locked-up self so vehemently; but it certainly made the stranger shine with a beautiful mild lustre.  Their spirits partly succumbed to him by a process too lengthened to explain here.  Indeed, I dare do no more than hint at these mysteries of feminine emotion.  I beg you to believe that when we are dealing with that wonder, the human heart female, the part played by a tail-coat and a composed