This requires but brief deliberation; and so, my dear Frank, you must excuse my company, both at dinner and pic-nic. What an ass he must be to suppose that a man of thirty has got no farther insight into the world, and knows no more of its inhabitants, than a boy of eighteen! These “quizzes,” doubtless, had been very amusing to me once--just as I used to laugh at the “School for Scandal” the first fifty times I saw it; but now that I have _épuisé les ridicules_--have seen every manner of absurdity the law of Chancery leaves at large--why hammer out the impression by repetition? What is here by way of postscript? “Lady B. has made the acquaintance of a certain Sicilian Countess, the handsomest woman here, and has engaged her for Saturday. If you be the man you used to be, you’ll not fail to come.” ***** “Dear F---- “I cannot dine out. I can neither eat, drink, nor talk, nor can I support the heat or ‘confaz’ of a dinner; but, if permitted, will join your party on Saturday for half an hour. “Yours truly, “H. Templeton.” Now has curiosity--I have no worthier name to bestow on it--got the better of all my scruples and dislikes to such an agglomeration as a pic-nic! Socially I know nothing so bad: the liberty is license, and the license is an intolerable freedom, where only the underbred are at ease. _N’importe_--I’ll go; for while I now suspect that I was wrong in believing the Countess to have been my old acquaintance, Caroline Graham, I have a strange interest, at least, in seeing how one so like her, externally, may resemble her in traits of mind and manner. And then I’ll leave Baden. I am really impatient to get away. I feel--I suppose there is nothing unusual in the feeling--that, as I meet acquaintances, I can read in their looks those expressions of compassion and pity by which the sick are admonished of their hopeless state; and for the very reason that I can dare to look it steadily in the face myself, I have a strong repugnance to its being forcibly placed before me. My greatest wish to live--if it ever deserved the name of wish--is to see the upshot of certain changes that time inevitably will bring out. I have watched the game in some cases so closely, I should like to know who rises the winner.