Mr. George nodded at his plate discreetly.

‘Well,’ said Lady Jocelyn, leaning back, and lifting her face upward in the discursive fulness of her fancy, ’I feel I am not robbed.  ’Il y a des miracles, et j’en ai vu’.  One’s life seems more perfect when one has seen what nature can do.  The fellow was stupendous!  I conceive him present.  Who’ll fire a house for me?  Is it my deficiency of attraction, or a total dearth of gallant snobs?’

The Countess was drowned.  The muscles of her smiles were horribly stiff and painful.  Caroline was getting pale.  Could it be accident that thus resuscitated Mel, their father, and would not let the dead man die?  Was not malice at the bottom of it?  The Countess, though she hated Mr. George infinitely, was clear-headed enough to see that Providence alone was trying her.  No glances were exchanged between him and Laxley, or Drummond.

Again Mel returned to his peace, and again he had to come forth.

‘Who was this singular man you were speaking about just now?’ Mrs. Evremonde asked.

Lady Jocelyn answered her:  ’The light of his age.  The embodied protest against our social prejudice.  Combine—­say, Mirabeau and Alcibiades, and the result is the Lymport Tailor:—­he measures your husband in the morning:  in the evening he makes love to you, through a series of pantomimic transformations.  He was a colossal Adonis, and I’m sorry he’s dead!’

‘But did the man get into society?’ said Mrs. Evremonde.  ’How did he manage that?’

‘Yes, indeed! and what sort of a society!’ the dowager Copping interjected.  ’None but bachelor-tables, I can assure you.  Oh!  I remember him.  They talked of fetching him to Dox Hall.  I said, No, thank you, Tom; this isn’t your Vauxhall.’

‘A sharp retort,’ said Lady Jocelyn, ’a most conclusive rhyme; but you’re mistaken.  Many families were glad to see him, I hear.  And he only consented to be treated like a footman when he dressed like one.  The fellow had some capital points.  He fought two or three duels, and behaved like a man.  Franks wouldn’t have him here, or I would have received him.  I hear that, as a conteur, he was inimitable.  In short, he was a robust Brummel, and the Regent of low life.’

This should have been Mel’s final epitaph.

Unhappily, Mrs. Melville would remark, in her mincing manner, that the idea of the admission of a tailor into society seemed very unnatural; and Aunt Bel confessed that her experience did not comprehend it.

‘As to that,’ said Lady Jocelyn, ’phenomena are unnatural.  The rules of society are lightened by the exceptions.  What I like in this Mel is, that though he was a snob, and an impostor, he could still make himself respected by his betters.  He was honest, so far; he acknowledged his tastes, which were those of Franks, Melville, Seymour, and George—­the tastes of a gentleman.  I prefer him infinitely to your cowardly democrat, who barks for what he can’t get, and is generally beastly.  In fact, I’m not sure that I haven’t a secret passion for the great tailor.’