Just after I left school I went back to visit old Thompson, and he and his wife took me to a ball at the Assembly Rooms.
It was quite a swell affair, and there weren't enough men.

So old Thompson edged us up to a grand dame with a row of daughters, and I heard him in plethoric whisper informing her, as in duty bound, just who I was, 'but,' added he, as a compensating fact, 'there isn't a finer or more gentlemanly fellow in the room.' So the old hen turned round and took me in with one eye, all my features and proportions; but it wasn't till Thompson told her that father was about to retire, and that I, of course, was looking to enter a higher walk, that she gave permission to trot me up.

Do you think I went?
They were pretty girls she had, and the music--I'd have given something to dance that night; but if I was the sort of man she'd let dance with her girls, she needn't have taken anything else into account; and if I was decent enough for them, it was because of something else in me other than what I did or didn't do.

I swore then, by all that's sweet--by music and pretty girls and everything else--that I'd carve carcases for the rest of my days, and if the ladies didn't want me they might do without me.

You know how it was with father; all the professional men in the place were only too glad to have a chat with him in the reading-rooms and the hotel.