Our difficulty all through the election was to contend with his humour.  The many triumphs it won for him, both in speech and in action, turned at least the dialectics of the argument against us, and amusing, flattering, or bewildering, contributed to silence and hold us passive.  Political convictions of his own, I think I may say with truth, he had none.  He would have been just as powerful, after his fashion, on the Tory side, pleading for Mr. Normanton Hipperdon; more, perhaps:  he would have been more in earnest.  His store of political axioms was Tory; but he did remarkably well, and with no great difficulty, in confuting them to the wives of voters, to the voters themselves, and at public assemblies.  Our adversary was redoubtable; a promising Opposition member, ousted from his seat in the North—­a handsome man, too, which my father admitted, and wealthy, being junior partner in a City banking firm.  Anna Penrhys knew him, and treacherously revealed some of the enemy’s secrets, notably concerning what he termed our incorrigible turn for bribery.

‘And that means,’ my father said, ’that Mr. Hipperdon does not possess the art of talking to the ladies.  I shall try him in repartee on the hustings.  I must contrive to have our Jorian at my elbow.’

The task of getting Jorian to descend upon such a place as Chippenden worried my father more than electoral anxieties.  Jorian wrote, ’My best wishes to you.  Be careful of your heads.  The habit of the Anglo-Saxon is to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels.  It is his notion of freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence.  Spare me the Sussex accent on your return.’

My father read out the sentences of this letter with admiring bursts of indignation at the sarcasms, and an evident idea that I inclined to jealousy of the force displayed.

‘But we must have him,’ he said; ’I do not feel myself complete without Jorian.’

So he made dispositions for a concert to be given in Chippenden town.  Jenny Chassediane was invited down to sing, and Jorian came in her wake, of course.  He came to suffer tortures.  She was obliging enough to transform me into her weapon of chastisement upon the poor fellow for his behaviour to her at the Ball-atrocious, I was bound to confess.  On this point she hesitated just long enough to imply a doubt whether, under any circumstances, the dues of men should be considered before those of her sex, and then struck her hands together with enthusiasm for my father, who was, she observed—­critical in millinery in the height of her ecstasy—­the most majestic, charming, handsome Henri III. imaginable, the pride and glory of the assembly, only one degree too rosy at night for the tone of the lavender, needing a touch of French hands, and the merest trifle in want of compression about the waistband.  She related that a certain Prince Henri d’Angleterre had buzzed at his ear annoyingly.  ’Et Gascoigne, ou est-il?’ called the King, and the Judge stepped forth to correct the obstreperous youth.  The Judge was Jennings, clearly prepared by my father to foil the Prince—­no other than Edbury.  It was incomprehensible to me that my father should tolerate the tatter’s pranks; unless, indeed, he borrowed his name to bonds of which I heard nothing.