'P.S.--And so it is after Bidelia Blake you'd be asking, Mr. Slyboots? Faith! she has changed her name. Bidelia, or "Biddy," as we knew her, transmogrified herself into Beatrice when she came over here. Not satisfied with that, she has altered her surname to Clarke. A fine, handsome, wealthy, warm-hearted husband he is, and no fool. He's a deal better than Biddy deserved. They have a mansion in Mayfair, and I have the run of the house, but I seldom go there, as I do not wish to make myself too cheap. I met them in the Park yesterday. Dash my buttons! as Li-Chung, the Chinaman, says, if you'd recognise Biddy. She was rosy with health and spirits (Nature's, not Kinahan's), and burning with jewels. I don't know if her husband chains her up at night, but she had a something like a brass dog-collar round her neck. And her wool--I believe you got a tress of it once--is not black now, but yellow--the effect, I am seriously afraid, not so much of London sunshine or London fog, as of golden hairwash. You had better ask her for another tress. 'H. B.' O'Hara's face, as he perused this letter, would have served as a model for an actor charged with the duty of reading a similar epistle on the stage. He liked his cousin, but he did not seek to conceal his impatience--nobody else was present--at Blake's recital of his meanderings in quest of a social position. The letter was humorous here and there, but he did not appreciate the humour. He wanted to hear of Bidelia; and when he did hear of her, in the abrupt way Hyacinth put it in his postscript,--well, his face was a study. He coloured, he re-read the passage, he clutched the paper tightly in his palm, he laughed, he sat down in his arm-chair, he read the postscript for the third time, and then he lit his pipe. It is an excellent plan to light one's pipe in moments of vexation. O'Hara _was_ vexed, more vexed than sorry. He puffed and thought, and thought and puffed, and knit his brows, and occasionally took the amber mouthpiece from between his lips and grinned in a scornful fashion, like the baffled villain of tragedy in a show-booth. He stood up at length, took the paper in which the tress of hair was confined, did not kiss it as his wont was, but flung it into the stove, where it lit up, as if it were well preserved in pomatum, crackled crisply, flared, and left a sharp ugly smell of singed goose behind it. O'Hara thought there was a peculiar repulsiveness in the odour. It was the result of his frame of mind. The perfumed locks of Cleopatra would have smelled as foul. The laws of nature are not affected by our prejudices. The body of the hero putrefies by the same process as the body of Hodge. O'Hara then sat down and set himself a-thinking anew. This was the sum of his thoughts; being literary, they wandered into quotation: