The summer and the season were at their mid-most, but though the former had been fine, the latter at present had been rather objectless. Balls, concerts, parties, all the various devices by which the crowd believes it amuses itself, and without which it would certainly be bored, had occurred with their usual frequency, but up till now no bright particular star had arisen to draw the eyes and the thoughts of all to itself. There had, in fact, been no “rage,” and neither book, play, violinist, or traveller, nor even a cowboy from the remote West, had appeared to fill the invitation-cards and usurp the thoughts of emigrant London. Why nobody had invented something by this time was not clear, for absolutely anything in the world can become the rage of one season to be dropped either like a hot potato or a soiled glove the next. The year before there had been a cowboy,--this year he was a hot potato, for he had become odiously familiar; a female palmist was also still in existence, but she was a soiled glove, since the pleasant _frisson_ of having a bewildering future told in all the horror of detail before your friends is an experience not to be repeated if subsequent events have shewn the prophecy to have been altogether erratic. But from the night of Lord Yorkshire’s concert hope began to wake in the season’s middle-aged breast, that it, too, like most of its predecessors, would be known by an engrossing topic to mark it out from others before it was numbered with the colourless dead. For the picturesque--of a picturesqueness unequalled even by last season’s cowboy--had at length arisen in the shape of twins from Hampshire, Challoner twins, Flints’s nephew and niece. They sprang from a country parsonage, where Flints’s brother, whom nobody had hitherto even heard of, lived like a sort of mediæval ascetic prophet in a lugubrious atmosphere of fasting and prayer and scourging and sack-cloth. He preached the most curdling sermons on Sunday, quite like Savonarola, on the comfortable doctrine of eternal damnation. About the twins, however, there was nothing in the least ascetic or mediæval: they were both quite young, hardly out of their teens, and were simply Diana and Apollo come to earth again. The girl (Helen, too) had Titian hair, in golden, glorious profusion, a face like the morning, and the inches of a goddess. And her charm, her bubbling spirits, her extraordinary enjoyment and vitality! She made everybody else look like a kitchen-maid, which was so delightful. But Martin--Phœbus Apollo, drunk with nectar! He played, too; Karl Rusoff said he had never heard anything like it, and the dear old angel simply wept the other night at Frank Yorkshire’s, when Phœbus Apollo first dawned, but wept floods. And what could have been more romantic than the manner of their appearance? People were asked--we were all asked--to Lord Yorkshire’s for “Music” in the bottom left-hand corner, expecting, perhaps, a couple of songs from