There was young Miss Kitcat who was really twenty-nine and single only because, so they said, no one would marry her since that affair with Sir Hector Macwrath, the young, Nova Scotia Baronet, more than ten years ago. To be sure, the matter was never rightly explained, and everybody excused the poor child because her mother never set her the best of examples, and as for her father, everybody knew that he thought of nothing but Mdlle. Dancaboute who had such trim ankles and spent so many guineas and even wore the Kitcat rubies at a Ranelagh supper-party. So Sir Hector married the lean heiress of Lord Glew, the chief of the MacStikkeys, and Miss Kitcat remained young Miss Kitcat for many a long day. There she was, swaying sleepily to the motion of the chair while now and then her hair would catch in a splinter of wood as the first chairman stumbled over a loose cobble. There was little Pinhorn whose father was a ship's chandler at Rye, but had made money as fast as money could be made over the War commissariat; there he was, strutting home from my Lady Bunbutter's, quite inlaid with diamonds, and with a swinging fob near as big as his own bullet head. Charles gave him a curt good-night as he passed, and wondered to himself how little Pinhorn ever dared challenge Captain Lagge to walk with him in Curtain Meads. Unluckily the Beau had heard of the meeting and went to remonstrate with the gallant Captain. "What did you say?" asked the Beau. "I said I would gladly cut the claws of every harpy on the transport," answered the sailor. "Well, so you may, sir," said Mr. Ripple, "but by Heaven! you shan't do so here." Next morning the Captain had his orders and was shot through the heart in the Carthagena business. Poor Captain Lagge, he had a wife and a little maid waiting for him in the prettiest cottage between Pevensey and Brighthelmstone. Charles passed many others whose small histories, could I recount them, would fill this book to overflowing. For each one he could recall some unsavoury episode, some mean adventure that made its hero contemptible. "Oddslife," thought Charles, "was ever Society so corrupt, so insincere, so entirely damnable?" By this time he was back in the High Street after a long circuit, and just as he was thinking of crossing the road to reach the _Blue Boar_ and bed, he noticed a candle was burning in his bookseller's little back parlour. "I'll inquire after the sale of my poems," he decided, and without more ado hammered loudly on the door of the shop. Presently in answer to his continuous rappings, a foxy-faced old young man with a premature stoop and cloaths both squalid and ill-cut, shuffled through the shop and asked who was there. "A mendicant poet," cried Charles. "Be d----d," muttered the foxy-faced man, preparing to go back. "Come, Mr. Virgin, you'll open to me, Charles Lovely?"