freshets of tears, consumed many "nervous pills" of the retired-clergyman-whose-sands-of-life-have-nearly-run-out sort, and netted bead purses for the Select Home for Poor Gentlemen's Daughters. Josephine let down her back hair dowdily, partook recklessly of poetry and pickles, read inordinately in bed,—leaning all night on her elbow,—and was threatened with spinal curvature and spiritualism. Adelaide set invisible little traps in every nook and cranny, every cupboard and drawer, from basement to attic, and with a cheerful, innocent smile sat watching them night and day. Madeline, fiercely calm, warned off the others, with pale lips and flashing eyes and bitter tongue, resenting en famille the devilish endearments she so sweetly suffered in company; but ever as she groped about in her soul's blindness she felt for the central props of that house of Dagon.
All the good society of Hendrik said the Splurges were a charming family, a most attached and happy family, lovely in their lives and in death not to be divided, and that they looked sweetly in hoops. And yet the Splurges had but few visitors; the young women of the neighborhood, when they called there, left always an essential part of their true selves behind them as they entered, and an ornamental part of their reputations when they took their departure; nor were the young men partial to the name,—for Josephine bored them, and Adelaide taunted them, and Madeline snubbed them, and Mrs. Marmaduke pumped them, and the combined family confounded them. Only Mr. Philip Withers was the intimate and encouraged habitué of the house.
Mr. Philip Withers was the very man for the looser principles of Hendrik,—a fine gentleman's fine son, and his only one, who, by the death of his father, had come, whilst he was yet very young, into a pretty property in the neighborhood,—a sort of idyllic man of the world, with considerable cleverness, a neat miscellaneous education, handsome person, effective clothes, plausible address, mischievous brilliancy of versatile talk, a deep voice, two or three accomplishments best adapted to the atmosphere of sentimental women, graceful self-possession, small feet, nice hands, striking attitudes, a subduing smile, magnetic whisper, Machiavellian tact, and French morals. He could sing you into tears, and dance you into love, and talk you into wonder; when he drew, you begged for his portrait by himself, and when he wrote, you solicited his autograph.
Mr. Philip Withers had taken his moustache to foreign parts, and done the Continent sophisticatedly. He was well-read in cities, and had brought home a budget of light, popular, and profusely illustrated articles of talk on an equivocal variety of urban life, which he prettily distributed among clovery pastorals, Wordsworthian ballads, De Coverly entertainments, Crayon sketches, and Sparrowgrass Papers, for the benefit of his country subscribers. From all of which you have no doubt gathered by this time that Mr. Philip Withers was a graceful scamp, and a friend of the Splurges,—who had money, which Mr. Philip Withers had not; for he had been a munificent patron of elegant pleasures abroad, and since his return had erected an addition to his father's house in the shape of a pair of handsome mortgages, as a proprietor of romantic tastes in architecture might flank his front door with mediæval donjons.
Mrs. Marmaduke made much of that good-looking and delightful Withers. Though not a pious man, in the formal sense of the term, she felt sure he was religious according to that stained-glass and fragrant religion of the tastes which is an essential attribute of every gentleman,—that is, of every well-born man of cultivated preferences and sensitive antipathies,—and she had no doubt that gentlemen's souls could be saved by that arrangement just as satisfactorily, and so much more gracefully. She only wished, my dear, you could hear Mr. Withers express himself on those subjects,
