He, for his part, had come to entertain such dread of the post, that Lady Camper’s return relieved him of his morning apprehensions; and he would have forgiven her, though he feared to see her, if only she had promised to leave him in peace for the future.  He feared to see her, because of the too probable furnishing of fresh matter for her ladyship’s hand.  Of course he could not avoid being seen by her, and that was a particular misery.  A gentlemanly humility, or demureness of aspect, when seen, would, he hoped, disarm his enemy.  It should, he thought.  He had borne unheard-of things.  No one of his friends and acquaintances knew, they could not know, what he had endured.  It has caused him fits of stammering.  It had destroyed the composure of his gait.  Elizabeth had informed him that he talked to himself incessantly, and aloud.  She, poor child, looked pale too.  She was evidently anxious about him.

Young Rolles, whom he had met now and then, persisted in praising his aunt’s good heart.  So, perhaps, having satiated her revenge, she might now be inclined for peace, on the terms of distant civility.

‘Yes! poor Elizabeth!’ sighed the General, in pity of the poor girl’s disappointment; ’poor Elizabeth! she little guesses what her father has gone through.  Poor child!  I say, she hasn’t an idea of my sufferings.’

General Ople delivered his card at Lady Camper’s lodgegates and escaped to his residence in a state of prickly heat that required the brushing of his hair with hard brushes for several minutes to comfort and re-establish him.

He had fallen to working in his garden, when Lady Camper’s card was brought to him an hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing promptitude, showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the General instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women, which he had come upon in quotations in the papers and the pulpit, his two main sources of information.

Instead of handing back the card to the maid, he stuck it in his hat and went on digging.

The first of a series of letters containing shameless realistic caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following.  They came fast and thick.  Not a day’s interval of grace was allowed.  Niobe under the shafts of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed.  The deadliness of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one of the most sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the opinion of the world.  He might have concealed the sketches, but he could not have concealed the bruises, and people were perpetually asking the unhappy General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself as if he were repeating something to them for the tenth time.

‘I say,’ said he, ’I say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to sit, as she must—­I was saying, she must have sat in an attic to have the right view of me.  And there you see—­this is what she has done.  This is the last, this is the afternoon’s delivery.  Her ladyship has me correctly as to costume, but I could not exhibit such a sketch to ladies.’