Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling chord.  “In spite of men’s hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg.”

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you:  and obscure it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who have eyes.  You see it:  or, you see he has it.  Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do:  many, with a good show of reason, throw the accent upon leg.  And the ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby’s leg was exquisite; he had a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe.  Mrs. Mountstuart signified that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg.  There it is, and it will shine through!  He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between “You shall worship me”, and “I am devoted to you;” is your lord, your slave, alternately and in one.  It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples.  Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into the hearts of women.  Nothing so fatal to them.

Self-satisfied it must be.  Humbleness does not win multitudes or the sex.  It must be vain to have a sheen.  Captivating melodies (to prove to you the unavoidableness of self-satisfaction when you know that you have hit perfection), listen to them closely, have an inner pipe of that conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the chirp.

And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without the naughtiness.  You see eminent in him what we would fain have brought about in a nation that has lost its leg in gaining a possibly cleaner morality.  And that is often contested; but there is no doubt of the loss of the leg.

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely enough.  But what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean—­simply legs for leg-work, dumb as the brutes.  Our cavalier’s is the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance.  He has it as Cicero had a tongue.  It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier, is she obdurate.  In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul.

And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise.  It blushes, it pales, can whisper, exclaim.  It is a peep, a part revelation, just sufferable, of the Olympian god—­Jove playing carpet-knight.

For the young Sir Willoughby’s family and his thoughtful admirers, it is not too much to say that Mrs. Mountstuart’s little word fetched an epoch of our history to colour the evening of his arrival at man’s estate.  He was all that Merrie Charles’s court should have been, subtracting not a sparkle from what it was.  Under this light he danced, and you may consider the effect of it on his company.