Miss Lushington’s bright eyes flashed. “Ladies are very different in their tastes,” said she, laying a withering stress of sarcasm on this general and incontestable position. “Some women, Mr. Softly” (I have omitted to mention that my address is Cyrus Softly, Esq., Hat and Umbrella Club, London)—“some women seem to me more like men than women. In course every one to her liking. For my part, I say nothing; but this I _will_ say: for a lady to come down to a out-o’-the-way corner like this—no friends, no followers; nothing but that highty-tighty maid (and if ever I catch her put her saucy face inside my bar, I’ll give her a piece of my mind, see if I don’t,) and hunt, hunt, hunt, day after day, and when it’s a frost or what not, read, read, read, from morning till night, and never out of a riding-habit, or else a plain dark gownd with no more trimming than on the back of my ’and” (Miss Lushington, when excited, had a habit of catching her breath, and in so doing let go a certain number of aspirates, and added a few elegant superfluities of language). “Why, I say it isn’t natural, and if it isn’t natural, there must be something in it, don’t you think so, Mr. Softly? And to see a maid dressed out like that flaunting miss, in flounces and fal-lals, with a velvet net to her ’air, and hear-rings like any lady of the land! In course it ain’t my place to make remarks, Mr. Softly; but you can’t prevent my thinking it a pity and a shame, not if you was to hang me alive for it the very next minute, there!” Foreseeing no advantageous result from a continuance of the discussion with Miss Lushington, and surmising also that the strong opinion she had formed of the new arrivals was partly owing to Justine’s attractions, I left the barmaid in her own department, placing her hand to her side for “occasional spasms,” and catching her breath loudly at intervals, as is the habit of the sex when stimulated by any unusual excitement, and proceeded up the staircase and along the dark passage that led to my dormitory, pondering deeply on all that I had heard and seen.