“A winning wave, deserving note Of a tempestuous petticoat,” cries the poet of an earlier age. Femininity must needs rustle and whisper, and curtsy and flounce through every chapter. * * * * * The collaborator whose name appears for the last time on this title page, turned to the century of The Bath Comedy and the subsequent and connected chronicles as a kind of relaxation of the mind from what he most hated: the ugliness of modern life. The realism which sets itself to describe the material, the grosser aspect of any emotion, the brutality that miscalls itself strength, that forcing of the note of horror--which is no more power than the beating of a tin can or the shrieking of a syren is music--were abhorrent to him. He liked the pretty period in spite of its artificialities; he liked the whole glamour of the time; he liked its reticence and its gaiety, its politeness, its wit, and its naughtiness and its quaintness, because, as in an artistic bout of fencing, it was all bounded by a certain measure of grace and rule. The laughter he gave to these conceptions came, as true laughter must, from a most innocent and wholesome heart. It is this laughter which is his last legacy to a sad, tangled, and rather ugly world. AGNES EGERTON CASTLE. PROLOGUE “_No man is hero to his valet_”; so runs the cynical adage. But you can reverse the saying with reference to the other sex. _Every woman is a heroine to her lady’s maid_; it may not be true in all cases, but ’tis true enough for any proverb. The romance of a lady’s own woman is centred in her mistress. She will clothe her in finery with a greater joy than if she were draping herself; rather than see her go shabby she would wear sackcloth; she will hang over the banisters, on a dinner-party night, to observe the sit of her train as she sweeps downstairs on the arm of some notable personage; she will lean out of the window to watch her step into her sedan, and if there are Beaux hovering and my Lady tosses her plumes and whisks her panniers to proper advantage it is Abigail’s heart that beats high with pride. Even Miss Lydia Pounce, own woman to my Lady Kilcroney, a damsel remarkable from her earliest youth for her tart and contradictious ways, who was verging on elderliness now with the acidity and leanness peculiar to the “born old maid,” would have laid down her life to ensure that my Lady’s court gown should fit her trim waist without a wrinkle, or that the pink silk stocking that clothed her pretty leg was drawn to its proper skin-tight limit.