have married an old man.”  What!  I say to him, must an old man wear antiquated trowsers?  No! nothing will turn him; those are his habits.  But, you have not heard the worst.  The sight of those hideous trowsers totally destroying all shape in the man, is horrible enough; but it is absolutely more than a woman can bear to see him—­for he will shave—­first cover his face with white soap with that ridiculous centre-piece to his trowsers reaching quite up to his poll, and then, you can fancy a woman’s rage and anguish! the figure lifts its nose by the extremist tip.  Oh! it’s degradation!  What respect can a woman have for her husband after that sight?  Imagine it!  And I have implored him to spare me.  It’s useless.  You sneer at our hbops and say that you are inconvenienced by them but you gentlemen are not degraded,—­Oh! unutterably!—­as I am every morning of my life by that cruel spectacle of a husband.’

I have but faintly sketched Mrs. Romer’s style.  Evelina, who is prudish and thinks her vulgar, refused to laugh, but it came upon me, as the picture of ‘your own old husband,’ with so irresistibly comic an effect that I was overcome by convulsions of laughter.  I do not defend myself.  It was as much a fit as any other attack.  I did all I could to arrest it.  At last, I ran indoors and upstairs to my bedroom and tried hard to become dispossessed.  I am sure I was an example of the sufferings of my sex.  It could hardly have been worse for Mrs. Romer than it was for me.  I was drowned in internal laughter long after I had got a grave face.  Early in the evening Mr. Pollingray left us.

CHAPTER III

HE

I am carried by the fascination of a musical laugh.  Apparently I am doomed to hear it at my own expense.  We are secure from nothing in this life.

I have determined to stand for the county.  An unoccupied man is a prey to every hook of folly.  Be dilettante all your days, and you might as fairly hope to reap a moral harvest as if you had chased butterflies.  The activities created by a profession or determined pursuit are necessary to the growth of the mind.

Heavens!  I find myself writing like an illegitimate son of La Rochefoucauld, or of Vauvenargues.  But, it is true that I am fifty years old, and I am not mature.  I am undeveloped somewhere.

The question for me to consider is, whether this development is to be accomplished by my being guilty of an act of egregious folly.

Dans la cinquantaine!  The reflection should produce a gravity in men.  Such a number of years will not ring like bridal bells in a man’s ears.  I have my books about me, my horses, my dogs, a contented household.  I move in the centre of a perfect machine, and I am dissatisfied.  I rise early.  I do not digest badly.  What is wrong?

The calamity of my case is that I am in danger of betraying what is wrong with me to others, without knowing it myself.  Some woman will be suspecting and tattling, because she has nothing else to do.  Girls have wonderfully shrewd eyes for a weakness in the sex which they are instructed to look upon as superior.  But I am on my guard.