Oliver was too manly, with a higher manliness than Jack Dadd’s or than that of many persons of far greater pretensions than Jack, to experience the particular dread of misconception which Fan had sought to instil into her brother. He was shy enough in his way, and he fought tough battles with his shyness every day he lived, but his self-consciousness did not take this form. He had revolted at it every time he met it, not only when young Dadd boasted of girls making dead sets at him, and showing themselves, poor little souls, spoony on his account, but when fellows, who might have known better, expressed their alarm for the lasting consequences of the temporary associations of Commemoration Week, or talked of running the gauntlet of the dowagers and damsels of the London season. Oliver had felt still more aggrieved when he found the same gratuitous insinuations in books of ‘unexceptionable tone,’ where men—bachelors and widowers, of mature years and sane minds, masters of the situation in every other respect—were represented as timidly putting themselves under the wings of female relations that the heads of the houses might be protected from the wary advances or bold attacks of the single women in their neighbourhood who cherished designs on their freedom. Well, no doubt, there were women of all kinds, like men; but was it honest women, modest women, women with souls, women like the men’s mothers, sisters, future and past wives, whom brother-men thus insulted, while sister-women handed on the insult? Oliver’s company certainly induced the Polley girls to forego, for the evenings on which he called, their wanderings abroad in search of gossip and amusement, which their mother tolerated because young folks must have their day, and the girls had their markets (matrimonial) to make, being bound, in a measure, to keep on the outlook for settlements in life. But the young Polleys’ gaddings were restrained within certain well-defined and not to be subverted bounds of time and circumstance. The Miss Polleys, collectively or singly, might frequent their neighbours’ houses or such promenades as Friarton afforded, till three quarters past nine, but they must be safe at home, if not at supper, at the latest by ten o’clock, when the house-door was formally locked by Mrs. Polley in person. No Miss Polley was at liberty to stray into companionship not approved of by her mother, not even ’Mily—‘the most owdacious of the set,’ as Mrs. Polley was sometimes moved to term her favourite daughter, in referring to ’Mily’s flights of wild spirits and self-will—dared to transgress in these respects.