"I think Pope must have had you in his mind when he wrote his famous lines: "'Men some to business, some to pleasure take, But every woman is at heart a rake.'" "The deuce she is!" cried Mr.Vanstone, entering the room while Miss Garth was making her quotation, with the dogs at his heels.

"Well; live and learn.

If you're all rakes, Miss Garth, the sexes are turned topsy-turvy with a vengeance; and the men will have nothing left for it but to stop at home and darn the stockings .-- Let's have some breakfast." "How-d'ye-do, papa ?" said Magdalen, taking Mr.Vanstone as boisterously round the neck as if he belonged to some larger order of Newfoundland dog, and was made to be romped with at his daughter's convenience.

"I'm the rake Miss Garth means; and I want to go to another concert--or a play, if you like--or a ball, if you prefer it--or anything else in the way of amusement that puts me into a new dress, and plunges me into a crowd of people, and illuminates me with plenty of light, and sets me in a tingle of excitement all over, from head to foot.

Anything will do, as long as it doesn't send us to bed at eleven o'clock." Mr.Vanstone sat down composedly under his daughter's flow of language, like a man who was well used to verbal inundation from that quarter.