It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister; and for a man, running the posts with four horses, presumably with open pockets, and in the company of the most entrancing little creature conceivable, to have come down so far as to be laughed at by his own postillions, was only to be explained on the double hypothesis, that he was a fool and no gentleman.
I have said they were man and woman.

I should have said man and child.
She was certainly not more than seventeen, pretty as an angel, just plump enough to damn a saint, and dressed in various shades of blue, from her stockings to her saucy cap, in a kind of taking gamut, the top note of which she flung me in a beam from her too appreciative eye.

There was no doubt about the case: I saw it all.

From a boarding-school, a black-board, a piano, and Clementi's _Sonatinas_, the child had made a rash adventure upon life in the company of a half-bred hawbuck; and she was already not only regretting it, but expressing her regret with point and pungency.
As I alighted they both paused with that unmistakable air of being interrupted in a scene.

I uncovered to the lady and placed my services at their disposal.
It was the man who answered.