No young man of his age was more courted both by men and women.

There was no one who in his youth had suffered fewer troubles from those causes of trouble which visit English young men,--occasional impecuniosity, sternness of parents, native shyness, fear of ridicule, inability of speech, and a general pervading sense of inferiority combined with an ardent desire to rise to a feeling of conscious superiority.

So much had been done for him by nature that he was never called upon to pretend to anything.

Throughout the county those were the lucky men,--and those too were the happy girls,--who were allowed to call him Arthur.

And yet this paragon was vainly in love with Emily Wharton, who, in the way of love, would have nothing to say to him, preferring,--as her father once said in his extremest wrath,--a greasy Jew adventurer out of the gutter! And now it had been thought expedient to have him down to Wharton, although the lawyers' regular summer vacation had not yet commenced.
But there was some excuse made for this, over and above the emergency of his own love, in the fact that his brother John, with Mrs.
Fletcher, was also to be at the Hall,--so that there was gathered there a great family party of the Whartons and Fletchers; for there was present there also old Mrs.Fletcher, a magnificently aristocratic and high-minded old lady, with snow-white hair, and lace worth fifty guineas a yard, who was as anxious as everybody else that her younger son should marry Emily Wharton.