The Major danced famously. Above all things, he prided himself on being a ladies' man, and the fair sex (as he always called them) admired him without disguise. His manner towards them was gallant yet deferential, tender yet manly. He conceded everything to their weakness; yet no man in Troy could treat a woman with greater plainness of speech. The confirmed spinsters (high and low, rich and poor, we counted seventy-three of them in Troy) seemed to like him none the less because he lost no occasion, public or private, of commending wedlock. For the doctrine of Mr. Malthus (recently promoted to a Professorship at the East India College) he had a robust contempt. He openly regretted that, owing to the negligence of our forefathers, the outbreak of war found Great Britain with but fifteen million inhabitants to match against twenty-five million Frenchmen. _They_ threatened to invade _us_, whereas _we_ should rather have been in a position to march on Paris! He asked nothing better. He quoted with sardonic emphasis the remark of a politician that "'twas hardly worth while to go to war merely to prove that we could put ourselves in a good posture for defence." "If I had my way," announced Major Hymen, "every woman in England should have a dozen children at least." "What a man!" said Miss Pescod afterwards to Miss Sally Tregentil, who had dropped in for a cup of tea. And yet the Major was a bachelor. They could not help wondering a little. "With two such names, too!" mused Miss Sally. "'Solomon' and 'Hymen'; they certainly suggest--they would almost seem to give promise of, at least, a _dual_ destiny." "You mark my words," said Miss Pescod. "That man has been crossed in love." "But _who_?" asked Miss Sally, her eyes widening in speculation. "_Who_ could have done such a thing?" "My dear, I understand there are women in London capable of anything." The Major, you must know, had spent the greater part of his life in the capital as a silk-mercer and linen-draper--I believe, in the Old Jewry; at any rate, not far from Cheapside. He had left us at the age of sixteen to repair the fortunes of his family, once opulent and respected, but brought low by his great-grandfather's rash operations in South Sea stock. In London, thanks to an ingratiating manner with the sex on which a linen-draper relies for patronage, he had prospered, had amassed a competence, and had sold his business to retire to his native town, as Shakespeare retired to Stratford-on-Avon, and at about the same period of life.