“‘_The Debutante and the Debauchee._’ We are charmed to announce that another Tale of Fashionable Life has just issued from the facile pen of that well-known and much-appreciated delineator of the Doings of the Upper Ten, Lady Lavinia Gathercole. We need not say that in her new Work the talented Authoress will abundantly sustain her reputation amongst the _Beau Monde_, of which she is herself a brilliant and accomplished member,” &c., &c. The descent in the price of the _Morning Post_ having destroyed its reputation with the old ladies, who were its principal subscribers, and who could not bear seeing it descend to the level of a “Penny Dreadful,” the sale of Lady Lavinia’s novels became small by degrees, and alarmingly less, until it ceased altogether. Upon this, Lady Lavinia, who, at the instance of Lord Bungay, the then premier, had been given apartments at Hampton Court, thought it high time that she should be “converted,” in the evangelical sense of that much-abused word, and the operation was accordingly performed by Mr. Moodle, the eminent apostle of the lower grades of the female aristocratic world. This gentleman, who had been a somewhat fast “Somerset House young man,” had somehow been pitchforked into the position of Commissioner of Taxes, and having noticed the commercial success of the trash which Dr. Cumming and other “religious” quacks annually threw off, he determined to set up in the same line himself. So well, indeed, did he find this scheme pay, that he was on the point of marrying the Dowager Marchioness of Scampingham, when unluckily the young Marquis caught the self-sent apostle in the act of chucking his lady-mother’s French maid under the chin on the grand staircase of Scampingham House, and thereupon incontinently kicked him down stairs, and out into the Square--an operation which Mr. Moodle bore with much pseudo-Christian meekness. Strange to say, this little episode did not destroy his popularity amongst his female devotees. In the first place, he promptly gave out that he had discovered that Lady Scampingham was of too worldly a disposition to merit a union with a saint like himself, and that therefore he had felt it his duty to draw back, as from the pit of Tophet; by which judicious course he came to be regarded in the light of a martyr and injured saint, and turned his kicking to his own advantage. In the next place, Moodle was a good-looking fellow enough, and his admirers, each of them, felt that, as he had _not_ married the Dowager, he might, and very likely _would_, marry her own sweet self; and so they petted him, and believed in him more than ever.