I was drawn to her side.  I had to listen to a repetition of sharp queries and replies, and affect a flattered gaiety, feeling myself most uncomfortably, as Captain DeWitt (who watched us) said, Chip the son of Block the father.  By fixing the son beside her, she defeated the father’s scheme of coldness, and made it appear a concerted piece of policy.  Even I saw that.  I saw more than I grasped.  Love for my father was to my mind a natural thing, a proof of taste and goodness; women might love him; but the love of a young girl with the morning’s mystery about her! and for my progenitor!—­a girl (as I reflected in the midst of my interjections) well-built, clear-eyed, animated, clever, with soft white hands and pretty feet; how could it be?  She was sombre as a sunken fire until he at last came round to her, and then her sudden vivacity was surprising.

Affairs were no further advanced when I had to obey the squire’s commands and return to Riversley, missing the night of the grand ball with no profound regret, except for my father’s sake.  He wrote soon after one of his characteristic letters, to tell me that the ball had, been a success.  Immediately upon this announcement, he indulged luxurious reflections, as his manner was: 

’To have stirred up the old place and given it something to dream of for the next half century, is a satisfaction, Richie.  I have a kindness for Bath.  I leave it with its factions reconciled, its tea-tables furnished with inexhaustible supplies of the chief thing necessary, and the persuasion firmly established in my own bosom that it is impossible to revive the past, so we must march with the age.  And let me add, all but every one of the bills happily discharged, to please you.  Pray, fag at your German.  If (as I myself confess to) you have enjoyment of old ways, habits, customs, and ceremonies, look to Court life.  It is only in Courts that a man may now air a leg; and there the women are works of Art.  If you are deficient in calves (which my boy, thank heaven! will never be charged with) you are there found out, and in fact every deficiency, every qualification, is at once in patent exhibition at a Court.  I fancy Parliament for you still, and that is no impediment as a step.  Jorian would have you sit and wallow in ease, and buy (by the way, we might think of it) a famous Burgundy vineyard (for an investment), devote the prime of your life to the discovery of a cook, your manhood to perfect the creature’s education—­so forth; I imagine you are to get five years of ample gratification (a promise hardly to be relied on) in the sere leaf, and so perish.  Take poor Jorian for an example of what the absence of ambition brings men to.  I treasure Jorian, I hoard the poor fellow, to have him for a lesson to my boy.  Witty and shrewd, and a masterly tactician (I wager he would have won his spurs on the field of battle), you see him now living for one hour of the day—­absolutely twenty-three hours of the man’s life are chained slaves, beasts of burden, to the four-and-twentieth!  So, I repeat, fag at your German.