Horace Malahide, fresh from the society of well-bred people, at once found himself at ease with Betty. His bright wit, his airy love of life, his frank ways, his affection and his care for his father, his patience and his delicacy in correcting him, won the esteem of the girl. And she, for a day or so, not knowing the attraction of her own beauty, enjoyed his companionship. She realized, all at once, that he was ignoring his sisters. She found it impossible to withdraw herself from the position. Her sudden avoidances of him inflamed the youth’s desire for her companionship. He became a trial to her. Then came letters sad with sighs. How the young dogs all take to the same water! She found a fragment of the poetic pinned to her dressing-table, in which fragment was much rhyming of Modeyne with “_I ween_,” and tributes to “_dainty shoulders chill, and cruel with disdainings keen_,” and complaints of “_ignorings of worship that any beauty who, less proud of mien, had been, must surely needs have seen_.” The dictionary had been ransacked for rhymes. The lad was in the euphemistic stage of poetic debauchery; and Betty could never abide indifferent verse. He chose the surest way to this very desert of ignorings and shoulders chill and the like disdainings. The devil was in it for the lad all through. So the poetic bugling sounded the trump of his rejection. He went up to Oxford; and for close upon three days was well-nigh disconsolate. The lad’s admiration, most unwitting of it, did the girl a sad disservice. The unspoken verdict of their modish brother, in preferring this girl’s society to theirs, roused the ill-will of his neglected sisters; and the two young women, whilst their full red lips kissed Betty good-morning as sweetly as was their wont, took to tittle-tattling against her. The tittle-tattle bred further tittle-tattle, unloosed suggestive and insinuating tongues, and at last Dame Gossip bumped up, giggling, against the doors of _The Cock and Bull_ in Fleet Street. The tavern vomited its secret. The ghost of Major Modeyne arose from the dead and walked; and was seen in Park Lane. CHAPTER XXXIII _Which has to do with one of those Emotional Crises that change the Whole Tenor of a Man’s Political Convictions_ The millionaire was in the most hearty of good moods--could not sit still in his office--came home and could not sit still in his home. He tramped his house; was jocularly familiar with the servants; slapped the housemaids on the back; gave them half-sovereigns; twitted them about lovers; chaffed the shocked footman; dug the solemn butler Pontefract in the waistband; punched him in the chest and wind, the astounded servant clumsily guarding the threatened parts; and told him crude stories.