My aunt's criticism of him was highly characteristic of the British matron and her choice of friends.
"I thoroughly approve, Harry," she said to me, "of your friend, Mr.
Hamilton.

He is very well-informed and clever, and he doesn't allow it to make him in the least disagreeable." And starting from this, he was asked to dinner by, and invited to visit, a fair selection of pleasant people.
Of the events which immediately succeeded his return to England I can not, for two reasons, give a very detailed account.

In the first place, dealing as they do with living people, I have thought it better, after consultation with the friends of both, to leave the outlines of the story rather vague; and secondly, there are great gaps and deficiencies in diaries and letters, which, though I believe I can supply, knowing what I do of the circumstances, I hardly like to fill in in a narrative of fact.
He took a dose, as I have already said, of the London season.

"Those six weeks," he said, "absolutely knocked me up; my friends told me, among other things, that my physiognomy, being of a grave and gloomy cast, was of a kind that was not suitable to a festive occasion; and so I used to come home at night with my jaws positively aching with the effort of a perpetually fatuous grin." The following extract, which I have selected from one of his letters of this period, will give a good picture of his mind: "I think that two of the things that move me most, not to sadness nor indignation, but to those vague tumultuous feelings for which we have, I think, no name, but which were formerly called melancholy, are these: "To come up-stairs after a hot London banquet, where you have been sitting, talking the poorest trash, between two empty, worldly women; and then, perhaps, listening to stories that are dull, or worse, and see dullness personified in every one of the twelve faces that stare at you with such sodden respectability through the cigarette smoke; and then, I say, to come up-stairs, and see moving about among the knowing selfish people a child with hair like gold thread, and something of the regretful innocence of heaven in her eyes and motions.

If you can get her to talk to you, so much the better for you; but if you or she are shy, as generally happens, to watch her is something.