'Confound them all,' he said to himself as he left the house; 'no amount of experience enables a man to know them.' As he went away he almost thought that Lady Carbury had intended him to kiss her again, and he was almost angry with himself in that he had not done so.

He had seen her three or four times since, but had not repeated the offence.
We will now go on to the other letters, both of which were addressed to the editors of other newspapers.

The second was written to Mr Booker, of the 'Literary Chronicle.' Mr Booker was a hard-working professor of literature, by no means without talent, by no means without influence, and by no means without a conscience.

But, from the nature of the struggles in which he had been engaged, by compromises which had gradually been driven upon him by the encroachment of brother authors on the one side and by the demands on the other of employers who looked only to their profits, he had fallen into a routine of work in which it was very difficult to be scrupulous, and almost impossible to maintain the delicacies of a literary conscience.
He was now a bald-headed old man of sixty, with a large family of daughters, one of whom was a widow dependent on him with two little children.

He had five hundred a year for editing the 'Literary Chronicle,' which, through his energy, had become a valuable property.
He wrote for magazines, and brought out some book of his own almost annually.