So far at first. Then came the recollection of his straitened position, the reflection that Miss Townshend was an heiress, and the determination to go in seriously for a proposal--a determination which was very short-lived, owing to the discovery of the lady's engagement to Gustav Schröder. From the time of her marriage, Mrs. Schröder was by Beresford mentally relegated to a corps which included several married ladies of his acquaintance; for the most part young and pretty women, whose husbands were either elderly, or immersed in business, or, what was equally available, immersed in pleasure, and more attentive to other men's wives than to their own; ladies who required "notice," as they phrased it, and who were sufficiently good-looking to command it from some men, between whom and themselves there existed a certain understanding. Nothing criminal, nor approaching to criminality; for despite the revelations of the Divorce Court, there is, I take it, a something, whether it be in what is called our phlegmatic temperament, whether it be in the bringing-up of our English girls,--bringing-up of domesticity utterly unknown to Continental-bred young ladies, which hallows and keeps constantly present the image of the doting father and the tender mother, and all the sacred home-associations,--a something which strengthens the weak and arrests the hand of the spoiler, and leaves the sacrifice incomplete. The necessity for "notice," or for "being understood," or "for having some one to rely on" (the husband engaged in business or in the House being, of course, utterly untrustworthy), has created a kind of society which I can only describe as a kind of solid bread-and-butter _demi-monde_--a _demi-monde_ which, as compared with that state of existence known in France under the title, is as a club to a tavern, where the same things are carried on, but in a far more genteel and decorous manner. The relations of its different members to each other are as free from Wertherian sentimentalism as they are from Parisian license, and would probably be considered severely correct by that circle of upper Bohemians, of whose lives the younger Dumas has constituted himself the chronicler.