CHAPTER VII.
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER.
It was the height of the season, and the duties of the Household were proportionately and insupportably heavy.

The Brigades were fairly worked to death, and the Indian service, in the heat of the Afghan war, was never more onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derby to Ducal.
Escorts to Levees, guards of honor to Drawing rooms, or field-days in the Park and the Scrubs, were but the least portion of it.

Far more severe, and still less to be shirked, were the morning exercise in the Ride; the daily parade in the Lady's Mile; the reconnaissances from club windows, the vedettes at Flirtation Corner; the long campaigns at mess-breakfasts, with the study of dice and baccarat tactics, and the fortifications of Strasburg pate against the invasions of Chartreuse and Chambertin; the breathless, steady charges of Belgravian staircases when a fashionable drum beat the rataplan; the skirmishes with sharpshooters of the bright-eyed Irregular Lancers; the foraging duty when fair commanders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties; the ball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps; the terrible risk of crossing the enemy's lines, and being made to surrender as prisoners of war at the jails of St.George's, or of St.Paul's, Knightsbridge; the constant inspections of the Flying Battalions of the Ballet, and the pickets afterward in the Wood of St.John; the anxieties of the Club commissariats, and the close vigilance over the mess wines; the fatigue duty of ballrooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the clause in the Regulations never to wear the same gloves twice; all these, without counting the close battles of the Corner and the unremitting requirements of the Turf, worked the First Life and the rest of the Brigades, Horse and Foot, so hard and incessantly that some almost thought of changing into the dreary depot of St.Stephen's; and one mutinous Coldstreamer was even rash enough and false enough to his colors to meditate deserting to the enemy's camp, and giving himself up at St.George's--"because a fellow once hanged is let alone, you know!" The Household were very hard pressed through the season--a crowded and brilliant one; and Cecil was in request most of all.

Bertie, somehow or other, was the fashion--marvelous and indefinable word, that gives a more powerful crown than thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can ever bestow.

And no list was "the thing" without his name; no reception, no garden party, no opera-box, or private concert, or rose-shadowed boudoir, fashionably affiche without being visited by him.