Fifteen or twenty years ago, as I have said, Dolly Vanborough and the other ladies and gentlemen her contemporaries were not the respectable middle-aged people they are now, but for the most part foolish young folks just beginning their lives, looking out upon the world with respectful eyes, arrogant,--perhaps dogmatic, uncertain,--but with a larger belief, perhaps a more heroic desire, than exists among them now. To-day, for a good many of them, expediency seems a great discovery, and the stone that is to turn everything to gold. Take things as you find them, do so and so, not because you feel inclined, or because it is right and generous, but because the neighbours are looking on, it is expected of you; and then, with our old friend the donkey-man, we stagger off, carrying the ass upon our shoulders. I suppose it is a law of nature that the horizon should lower as we climb down the hill of life, only some people look upwards always, 'And stumble among the briers and tumble into the well.' This is true enough, as regards my heroine, who was often in trouble, often disappointed, ashamed, angry, but who will persist in her star-gazing to the end of her journey. When Dolly was nearly fifteen, her brother George was eighteen, and had just gone to college, starting in high spirits, and with visions of all the letters of the alphabet before him, and many other honourable distinctions. Dolly, dazzled, helped to pack his portmanteau. 'Oh, I wish I was going too!' Dolly said; 'girls never do anything, or go anywhere.' 'Mamma wants you to go to India,' said George. 'But the Admiral won't have me,' says Dolly; 'he wrote to Aunt Sarah about it, and said they were coming home. Are you going to take all these pipes and French novels?' 'I can never study without a pipe,' said George; 'and I must keep up my French.' Dolly and Lady Sarah were disappointed when George, notwithstanding these appliances for study, returned without any special distinctions. The first Christmas that he came back, he brought Robert Henley with him. The old grandmother in the Palace was dead, and the young man had no longer a lodging in Kensington. The two arrived after dinner, and found Lady Sarah established by the fire in the oak parlour. They had come up driving through a fierce Christmas wind from the station, and were glad of Dolly's welcome and comfortable cups of tea.