He was desperately in love with this girl--this bright, brilliant, haughty, wilful girl. Even in all the mad fervour of his passion he allowed to himself that she was haughty and wilful, and he loved her all the morel--loved her with a depth and earnestness, with a wild passionate longing such as he had never believed he could have felt. Haughty and wilful! were not these very qualities great ingredients in her charm? Had he not for nearly forty years been living with the tame and commonplace women among whom his lot had been cast, and had any of them ever had the slightest influence over him? had they ever caused his heart one extra vibration--his pulse one extra throb? Why should he not enter the lists and tilt amongst the others for the hand of this Queen of Beauty, who sat smiling so superciliously in the balcony? It was an open course, and he brought amongst his attributes a stout heart and a willing hand to the encounter. In curvettings and caracoles, and all the dainty manoeuvres of the _manège_, in courtly skill and trick of fence, there might be his superiors; but when the issue of the combat came to sheer hard fighting, where courage and persistency won the day, he would give way to none. And, carelessly fluttering over the leaves of his ledger, as in his dim City office he revolved all these thoughts within his mind, he felt--not without a blush of shame--that he had secured the services of a most potent ally within the citadel. In these portentous leaves the name of Edward Guyon, Esquire, of Queen-Anne Street, now had a small space reserved to itself, the details covering which, though insignificant in such a business as that of Streightley and Son, were multiplied amazingly since the first "transaction" which had brought the siren to the abode of Plutus. Over Robert Streightley Mr. Guyon had obtained an extraordinary influence; due, let it be stated, of course to a certain extent to the young merchant's infatuation, but also in a great degree to his own admirable tact. During the course of a life passed in business Robert had seen many specimens of _tracasserie_ and humbug, which his good nurse had enabled him to estimate at their real value; but he had never been brought in contact with any of their professors who had, or seemed to have, the real charm of social influence. In Mr. Guyon's society--and of late he had been admitted into a great deal of Mr. Guyon's society--Robert Streightley seemed to feel himself a different being. There was nothing rough or unpleasant in his new friend and those to whom his new friend introduced him; he became for the first time in his life aware of the existence of another world, where well-bred ease, polished manners, and refined conversation were substituted for that eternal strife and fight and wrangle for money-getting in which his whole previous existence had been passed.