lacked female society, and Mr. Vetch proposed to his amiable friend in Lomax Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the course of her life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine (so favourable a specimen till she began to go wrong) adopted his suggestion in the hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady whose appearance would doubtless exemplify (as Florentine’s originally had done) the fine taste of her nation; but she found the bookbinder and his wife a bewildering mixture of the brilliant and the relaxed, and was haunted long afterwards by the memory of the lady’s camisole in some hideous print, her uncorseted overflow and her carpet slippers. The acquaintance, none the less, was sealed three months later by a supper, one Sunday night, in Lisson Grove, to which Mr. Vetch brought his fiddle, at which Amanda presented to her hosts her adoptive son, and which also revealed to her that Madame Poupin could dress a Michaelmas goose if she couldn’t dress a fat Frenchwoman. This lady confided to the fiddler that she thought Miss Pynsent exceedingly _comme il faut—dans le genre anglais_; and neither Amanda nor Hyacinth had ever passed an evening of such splendour. It took its place, in the boy’s recollection, beside the visit, years before, to Mr. Vetch’s theatre. He drank in the remarks exchanged between that gentleman and M. Poupin. M. Poupin showed him his bindings, the most precious trophies of his skill, and it seemed to Hyacinth that on the spot he was initiated into a fascinating mystery. He handled the books for half an hour; Anastasius Vetch watched him without giving any particular sign. When therefore, presently, Miss Pynsent consulted her friend for the twentieth time on the subject of Hyacinth’s “career”—she spoke as if she were hesitating between the diplomatic service, the army and the church—the fiddler replied with promptitude: “Make him, if you can, what the Frenchman is.” At the mention of a handicraft poor Pinnie always looked very solemn, yet when Mr. Vetch asked her if she were prepared to send the boy to one of the universities, or to pay the premium required for his being articled to a solicitor, or to make favour on his behalf with a bank director or a merchant prince, or, yet again, to provide him with a comfortable home while he should woo the muse and await the laurels of literature—when, I say, he put the case before her with this cynical, ironical lucidity she only sighed and said that all the money she had ever saved was ninety pounds, which, as he knew perfectly well, it would cost her his acquaintance for evermore to take out of the bank. The fiddler had in fact declared to her in a manner not to be mistaken that if she should divest herself, on the boy’s account, of this sole nest-egg of her old age, he would wash his hands of her and her affairs. Her standard of success for Hyacinth was vague save on one point, as regards which she was passionately,