We had all, even Georgy, been reasonably happy in Belfield until Mr. Floyd and Antonio Thorpe came. My guardian's influence I will speak of later, for it touched only myself perhaps; but Tony's was felt more or less by us all. He widened our horizons at once, and, as usual, enlarged our imaginations at the expense of our belief in ourselves. We were not used exactly to be complimented on our ignorance of the world, but in Belfield habits of thought tended toward a pleasant conviction of the uselessness of all knowledge and experience that our best inhabitants did not happen to possess. Until Tony came we were in the habit of deploring the fate of people who were not born and brought up in Belfield. Almost the entire population were descendants of the original proprietors of the soil, and we had our own ideas about our first families. Thorpe's views, however, were not flattering: he was, in fact, one of those elegant young men whose innermost souls are penetrated with convictions of the inadequacy of intellects in general to appreciate theirs in particular. Both Jack and I passed sleepless nights at first, wretched at the thought of his sleeping beneath the same roof with Georgy Lenox--of his enjoying that mystical, beautiful experience of coming down every morning to find her at table with her hair freshly curled, to enjoy the felicity of passing her eggs and toast, to carve a slice for her from the joint which the welcome addition of the young man's payment for board allowed Mrs. Lenox to provide for her dinner. Then, too, we felt with a pang that he would receive with his unequalled grace all sorts of little services from the daughter of the house: she would pour his tea for him, counting the lumps of sugar and dropping cream upon them in the distracting way we knew; she would amuse him with her sweet-voiced chatter. He was so old, so handsome with his velvety eyes and his moustache, she might even fall in love with him. However, Georgy was not given to sentiment, and Tony, for his part, was utterly indifferent to her: indeed, the most exclusive circles in Belfield opened to him at once, for a young man with a moustache was a _rara avis_ there, the masculine element in the village falling short of social requirements, as its representatives were generally either in their first or second childhood. But the only intimacy he cultivated was with me and my mother: he criticised everybody else, and it was evident that he considered nothing in Belfield quite good enough for him.