Then, it was quite remarkable how often he found himself going to the very same theatre or the very same concert that the Gemmills had arranged to take Meenie to; and naturally—as it chanced he had no one going with him—he asked to be allowed to go with them. He even talked of taking a seat in Maple Street Church (this was the church that the Gemmills attended), for he said that he was tired to death of the preaching of that old fogey, Dr. Teith, and that Mr. Smilie’s last volume of poems (Mr. Smilie was the Maple Street Church minister) had aroused in him a great curiosity to hear his sermons. And as for Mr. Frank Lauder himself—well, he was pretty much as other young Glasgow men of fashion; though, to be sure, these form a race by themselves, and a very curious race too. They are for the most part a good-natured set of lads; free and generous in their ways; not anything like the wild Lotharios which, amongst themselves, they profess to be; well dressed; a little lacking in repose of manner; many of them given to boating and yachting—and some of them even expert seamen; nearly all of them fond of airing a bit of Cockney slang picked up in a London music hall during a fortnight’s visit to town. But their most odd characteristic is an affectation of knowingness—as if they had read the book of nature and human nature through to the last chapter; whereas these well-dressed, good-natured, but rather brainless young men are as innocently ignorant of that book as of most other books. Knowing but one language—and that imperfectly—is no doubt a bar to travel; but surely nowhere else on the face of the globe could one find a set of young fellows—with similar opportunities set before them—content to remain so thoroughly untutored and untravelled; and nowhere else a set of youths who, while professing to be men of the world, could show themselves so absolutely unversed in the world’s ways. But they (or some of them) understand the lines of a yacht; and they don’t drink champagne as sweet as they used to do; and no doubt, as they grow into middle age, they will throw aside the crude affectations of youth, and assume a respectable gravity of manner, and eventually become solid and substantial pillars of the Free, U.P., and Established Churches.