She cited naturalized ladies famous for the pastime.  Her world and its outskirts she knew thoroughly, even to the fact of my grandfather’s desire that I should marry Janet Ilchester.  She named a duke’s daughter, an earl’s.  Of course I should have to stop the scandal:  otherwise the choice I had was unrestricted.  My father she evidently disliked, but she just as much disliked an encounter with his invincible bonhomie and dexterous tongue.  She hinted at family reasons for being shy of him, assuring me that I was not implicated in them.

‘The Guelph pattern was never much to my taste,’ she said, and it consoled me with the thought that he was not ranked as an adventurer in the houses he entered.  I learned that he was supposed to depend chiefly on my vast resources.  Edbury acted the part of informant to the inquisitive harridan:  ’Her poor dear good-for-nothing Edbury! whose only cure would be a nice, well-conducted girl, an heiress.’  She had cast her eye on Anna Penrhys, but considered her antecedents doubtful.  Spotless innocence was the sole receipt for Edbury’s malady.  My father, in a fit of bold irony, proposed Lady Kane for President of his Tattle and Scandal Club,—­a club of ladies dotted with select gentlemen, the idea of which Jorian DeWitt claimed the merit of starting, and my father surrendered it to him, with the reservation, that Jorian intended an association of backbiters pledged to reveal all they knew, whereas the Club, in its present form, was an engine of morality and decency, and a social safeguard, as well as an amusement.  It comprised a Committee of Investigation, and a Court of Appeal; its object was to arraign slander.  Lady Kane declined the honour.  ‘I am not a washerwoman,’ she said to me, and spoke of where dirty linen should be washed, and was distressingly broad in her innuendoes concerning Edbury’s stepmother.  This Club sat and became a terror for a month, adding something to my father’s reputation.  His inexhaustible conversational art and humour gave it such vitality as it had.  Ladies of any age might apply for admission when well seconded:  gentlemen under forty-five years were rigidly excluded, and the seniors must also have passed through the marriage ceremony.

Outside tattle and scandal declared, that the Club was originated to serve as a club for Lady Edbury, but I chose to have no opinion upon what I knew nothing of.

These matters were all ephemeral, and freaks; they produced, however, somewhat of the same effect on me as on my father, in persuading me that he was born for the sphere he occupied, and rendering me rather callous as to the sources of ways and means.  I put my name to a bond for several thousand pounds, in conjunction with Lord Edbury, thinking my father right in wishing to keep my cheque-book unworried, lest the squire should be seized with a spasm of curiosity before the two months were over.  ’I promise you I surprise him,’ my father said repeatedly.  He did not say how:  I had the suspicion that he did not know.  His confidence and my growing recklessness acted in unison.