He was seated by his fireside in all the domestic respectability of a dressing-gown and slippers, with an evening paper on his knee, a slim smoke-coloured bottle at his elbow, and the mildest of cigars between his lips, when the traveller, weary and weather-stained, entered the lodging-house drawing-room.
Captain Paget received his friend very graciously, only murmuring some faint deprecation of the young man's reeking overcoat, with just such a look of gentlemanly alarm as the lamented Brummel may have felt when ushered into the presence of a "damp stranger." "And so you've come back at last," said the Captain, "from Dorking ?" He made a little pause here, and looked at his friend with a malicious sparkle in his eye.

"And how was the old aunt?
Likely to cut up for any considerable amount, eh?
It could only be with a view to that cutting-up process that you could consent to isolate yourself in such a place as Dorking.

How did you find things ?" "O, I don't know, I'm sure," Mr.Hawkehurst answered rather impatiently, for his worst suspicions were confirmed by his patron's manner; "I only know I found it tiresome work enough." "Ah, to be sure! elderly people always are tiresome, especially when they are unacquainted with the world.

There is a perennial youth about men and women of the world.

The sentimental twaddle people talk of the freshness and purity of a mind unsullied by communion with the world is the shallowest nonsense.