Richard, pursuing the usual course of Irish eldest sons, had adopted the profession least adapted for young men of small means, and large spending capacity, and had gone into his father's old regiment. John, the zealot of an earlier day, was at Oxford, considering the Church; Georgy's career has been announced, and the remaining twin had, with the special predisposition of his family towards financial failure, selected the profession of land-agent, in a country in which peasant-proprietorship was already in the air, and would soon become an accomplished fact. There remains, to complete the family history, Judith, and she, now aged twenty-one, was possibly the sole member of the house of Talbot-Lowry for whom a successful future might confidently be anticipated. Judith, a buccaneer by nature and by practice, was habitually engaged in swash-bucklering it on a round of visits. She was good-looking, tall, talkative, and an able player of all the games proper to the state of life to which she had been called. She was a competent guest, giving as much entertainment as she received, being of those who contribute as efficiently indirectly, as directly, to conversation, and are normally involved in one of those skirmishes of the heart, that cannot be described as engagements, but that, none the less, invest their heroines with an atmosphere of respect, and provide hostesses with subjects of anxiety and interest. At an early age, Christian was promoted by her elder sister to the position of confidante, and justified the promotion by the happy mixture of sympathy and cynicism with which she received the confidences. She was now well versed in the brief passions that, beginning at the second or third dance of a regimental ball, would, like some night-flowering tropic blossom, arrive at full splendour by supper time, and would expire languorously, to the strains of "God save the King." Christian, though young, was, as had been said, a capable audience. She could listen, with the severe and youthful grace that seemed to set her a little apart from others of her standing, to the feats of Judith and her fellow-blackguards, savouring and appraising the absurdities, and her comments upon them were offered with a sympathetic and skilled comprehension that excused her in Judith's eyes for her lack of ambition to emulate them. Dick Talbot-Lowry had ceased to boast of the predominance of the masculine gender among his offsprings, and rarely alluded to his sons without coupling with their names a vigorous statement of how far in excess of their value was their cost, usually ending with an enquiry into the dark rulings of Providence, who had bestowed an expensive family with one hand, and with the other had taken away the means of supporting it. Dick was sixty-four now, an unhappy moment in a dashing and artless career, with the shadow of advancing old age blighting and reproving the still ardent enjoyment of the pleasures of youth.