Serlo could not live without some little passion of the love sort. Elmira was of late grown up, we might almost say grown beautiful; for some time she had been attracting his attention: and Philina, with her usual dexterity, had favored this attachment so soon as she observed it. "We should train ourselves in time," she would say, "to the business of procuress: nothing else remains for us when we are old." Serlo and Elmira had by this means so approximated to each other, that, shortly after the departure of Philina, both were of a mind: and their small romance was rendered doubly interesting, as they had to hide it sedulously from the father; Old Boisterous not understanding jokes of that description. Elmira's sister had been admitted to the secret; and Serlo was, in consequence, obliged to overlook a multitude of things in both of them. One of their worst habits was an excessive love of junketing,--nay, if you will, an intolerable gluttony. In this respect they altogether differed from Philina, to whom it gave a new tint of loveliness, that she seemed, as it were, to live on air, eating very little; and, for drink, merely skimming off, with all imaginable grace, the foam from a glass of champagne. Now, however, Serlo, if he meant to please his doxies, was obliged to join breakfast with dinner; and with this, by a substantial bever, to connect the supper. But, amid gormandizing, Serlo entertained another plan, which he longed to have fulfilled. He imagined that he saw a kind of attachment between Wilhelm and Aurelia, and he anxiously wished that it might assume a serious shape. He hoped to cast the whole mechanical department of his theatrical economy on Wilhelm's shoulders; to find in him, as in the former brother, a faithful and industrious tool. Already he had, by degrees, shifted over to him most of the cares of management; Aurelia kept the strong-box; and Serlo once more lived as he had done of old, entirely according to his humor. Yet there was a circumstance which vexed him in secret, as it did his sister likewise. The world has a particular way of acting towards public persons of acknowledged merit: it gradually begins to be indifferent to them, and to favor talents which are new, though far inferior; it makes excessive requisitions of the former, and accepts of any thing with approbation from the latter.