"Oh!" answered Fife, "I have such female _levées_ every morning, you'd be surprised. People of the first respectability, I assure you, do me the honour to come when they want money." "How very condescending," said I. "Too much so sometimes, I can tell you," answered Fife, "for one morning last week, I gave £500 among them; but this, you know, will not quite do every morning: besides time, time is what I regret; they take up all my time, I can't get out. It is often past seven before I can get in my carriage, for the life of me, and then I lose my dinner to get out at all." "Why don't you make your servants deny you?" said I. "Why I tried that, but then my valet denied me one day to a charming creature whom I wished of all things to see, and I was obliged to open my doors to them all again, lest this sweet girl should re-visit me, and a second time be refused." I think it was on this evening I saw Colonel Parker for the first time. He appeared to have seriously attached himself to my sister Fanny. He was an officer in the Artillery, and a near relation to Lady Hyde Parker, I believe. I was anxious to see poor Fanny comfortably settled, and her tastes being all so quiet and her temper so amiable, I knew that riches were by no means necessary to her felicity. Colonel Parker possessed a comfortable independence, and was very anxious to have Fanny entirely under his protection. "She shall bear my name, and I will show her all the respect a wife can require, and she shall always find me a gentleman," said he. I could not however help thinking that Fanny, with her strictly honest principles, her modest, amiable character, and her beauty, ought to have been Parker's wife instead of his mistress, and therefore I did not advise her to live with him. His person was elegant; fine teeth and fine hair were however all he had to boast of in the way of beauty; but Fanny did not like handsome men, and appeared very much to admire and esteem Colonel Parker. I do not exactly know what age man he was; but I should think him under thirty.