On the voyage back to town, Richard was again selected to sit by Mrs. Mount.  Brayder and Adrian started the jokes.  The pair of parasites got on extremely well together.  Soft fell the plash of the oars; softly the moonlight curled around them; softly the banks glided by.  The ladies were in a state of high sentiment.  They sang without request.  All deemed the British ballad-monger an appropriate interpreter of their emotions.  After good wine, and plenty thereof, fair throats will make men of taste swallow that remarkable composer.  Eyes, lips, hearts; darts and smarts and sighs; beauty, duty; bosom, blossom; false one, farewell!  To this pathetic strain they melted.  Mrs. Mount, though strongly requested, declined to sing.  She preserved her state.  Under the tall aspens of Brentford-ait, and on they swept, the white moon in their wake.  Richard’s hand lay open by his side.  Mrs. Mount’s little white hand by misadventure fell into it.  It was not pressed, or soothed for its fall, or made intimate with eloquent fingers.  It lay there like a bit of snow on the cold ground.  A yellow leaf wavering down from the aspens struck Richard’s cheek, and he drew away the very hand to throw back his hair and smooth his face, and then folded his arms, unconscious of offence.  He was thinking ambitiously of his life:  his blood was untroubled, his brain calmly working.

“Which is the more perilous?” is a problem put by the Pilgrim:  “To meet the temptings of Eve, or to pique her?”

Mrs. Mount stared at the young man as at a curiosity, and turned to flirt with one of her Court.  The Guardsmen were mostly sentimental.  One or two rattled, and one was such a good-humoured fellow that Adrian could not make him ridiculous.  The others seemed to give themselves up to a silent waxing in length of limb.  However far they sat removed, everybody was entangled in their legs.  Pursuing his studies, Adrian came to the conclusion, that the same close intellectual and moral affinity which he had discovered to exist between our nobility and our yeomanry, is to be observed between the Guardsman class, and that of the corps de ballet:  they both live by the strength of their legs, where also their wits, if they do not altogether reside there, are principally developed:  both are volage; wine, tobacco, and the moon, influence both alike; and admitting the one marked difference that does exist, it is, after all, pretty nearly the same thing to be coquetting and sinning on two legs as on the point of a toe.

A long Guardsman with a deep bass voice sang a doleful song about the twining tendrils of the heart ruthlessly torn, but required urgent persuasions and heavy trumpeting of his lungs to get to the end:  before he had accomplished it, Adrian had contrived to raise a laugh in his neighbourhood, so that the company was divided, and the camp split:  jollity returned to one-half, while sentiment held the other.  Ripton, blotted behind the bosom, was only lucky in securing a higher degree of heat than was possible for the rest.  “Are you cold?” she would ask, smiling charitably.