‘Thank you for nothing.’ ’Mily rejected the proposal flippantly. ‘Nasty flat trash. I’m for as much champagne as I can get for my share, without mother interfering. There!’ Had ‘the girl of the period,’ with the fine fast tone which was found to have such a rousing effect on the jaded languor and formal worldly propriety of Mayfair, come down to dwell among the shopkeepers of Friarton? Oliver showed himself so far amenable to domestic and feminine influence as to make the concession to Fan’s having vouchsafed her company, and as it were pledged herself to civility, of taking his place with her in the omnibus of her choice—that which did not contain Jack Dadd and his detachment from the volunteer band. But even without Jack and his musical performers—who took time by the forelock, and were guilty of such enthusiasm in their duties as to seize their instruments at the very moment of starting, and fill the air with a truly military combination of fife and drum, serving as a summons to the rest of the townspeople to contemplate the setting forth of the shopkeepers on their great holiday—the other omnibus, filled with a company of girls dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, with rivulets of curls running in every direction; matrons with bonnets which supported thickets of flowers among cascades of lace; and men in their Sunday suits, was in itself so hilarious and so unconscious of any just cause for moderating its hilarity, that the girls’ giggles rose into screams of laughter, the matrons shouted through the din to each other, and the men outshouted their womankind, until the one vehicle was as noisy in a different way as the other. ‘Ain’t you a glum sort?’ a brother-volunteer said, in the freedom of the moment, to Oliver. ‘No,’ Oliver denied, ‘but I don’t see why I should disturb my neighbours with my pleasure.’ ‘Oh! as to that,’ the other merrymaker turned off the implied censure, ‘though we ain’t workpeople, we don’t take our pleasures so often that we should hold ourselves in when we do, lest we should disturb them as has no business save pleasure.’ It was true enough, and it was also true that here was an instance of Englishmen’s not taking their pleasure sadly. After all, it was a mere ebullition of excitement at starting, so far as the seniors were concerned. Very soon such members of the party as old Dadd and Mrs. Polley subsided into sobriety, verging on drowsiness and tartness, although their manners might not have the repose Which stamps the class of Vere de Vere.