If, then, Nature is in it, how has she been made active?  The reason of her launch upon this last adventure is, that she has perceived the person who can supply the virtue known to her by experience to be wanting.  Thus, in the broader instance, many who have journeyed far down the road, turn back to the worship of youth, which they have lost.  Some are for the graceful worldliness of wit, of which they have just share enough to admire it.  Some are captivated by hands that can wield the rod, which in earlier days they escaped to their cost.  In the case of General Ople, it was partly her whippings of him, partly her penetration; her ability, that sat so finely on a wealthy woman, her indifference to conventional manners, that so well beseemed a nobly-born one, and more than all, her correction of his little weaknesses and incompetencies, in spite of his dislike of it, won him.  He began to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in her grotesque sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the old ones while dreading the arrival of new.  You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of the swish; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking, Lady Camper’s foregone outlines of him.  For in the distance, the whip’s-end may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging flick.  But this craven melting in his heart was rebuked by a very worthy pride, that flew for support to the injury she had done to his devotions, and the offence to the sacred edifice.  After thinking over it, he decided that he must quit his residence; and as it appeared to him in the light of duty, he, with an unspoken anguish, commissioned the house-agent of his town to sell his lease or let the house furnished, without further parley.

From the house-agent’s shop he turned into the chemist’s, for a tonic—­a foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough in the blow he had just dealt himself, but he had been cogitating on tonics recently, imagining certain valiant effects of them, with visions of a former careless happiness that they were likely to restore.  So he requested to have the tonic strong, and he took one glass of it over the counter.

Fifteen minutes after the draught, he came in sight of his house, and beholding it, he could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud under Lady Camper’s windows, his insurgency was of such violence.  He talked of it incessantly, but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was looking pale, the reason why its modest merits touched him so.  He longed for the hour of his next dose, and for a caricature to follow, that he might drink and defy it.  A caricature was really due to him, he thought; otherwise why had he abandoned his bijou dwelling?  Lady Camper, however, sent none.  He had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that was rather a likeness, and a handsome likeness, except as regarded a certain disorderliness in his dress, which he knew to be very unlike him.  Still it despatched him to the looking-glass, to bring that verifier of facts in evidence against the sketch.  While sitting there he heard the housemaid’s knock at the door, and the strange intelligence that his daughter was with Lady Camper, and had left word that she hoped he would not forget his engagement to go to Mrs. Baerens’ lawn-party.