Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/202

200 is no compromise that will not affect your honour or your happiness; a false step at the outset in your private life may ruin your public life, so be careful of your freedom." Lord Meersbrook was elbowed away from his mentor, but he treasured her words, well aware that she had lived long in the world into which he was only entering, and even as he left the place did he find their value, by being led to an act of self-denial in declining to join a few gentlemen, whose society could not have failed to be delightful, to whom he had been introduced an hour before. "Lady Anne is a worldly woman," said he, "as I know to my sorrow; but then she does know the world she lives in well, and can have no motive but kindness in her advice. I feel quite certain she is ashamed of her past conduct to Arthur: we shall see." As he descended the stairs, two persons passed him, so remarkably dissimilar in their persons, dress, and carriage, that he could not forbear to look earnestly at them, as forming a criterion of the mixed character of company admissible in such places, and which was to him (with his preconceived notions of the inviolability of the female sanctum) an insuperable objection to such scenes of general resort. The first who passed him was a man about thirty, with a gait at once jaunty and clumsy, and who was so outrageously bedizened with eye-glass, watch-chain, and stock buckle, gay satin waistcoat, and new white continuations