In a Grass Country; A Story of Love and Sport

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MY LORD AND MY LADY. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables, Would 1 had met my dearest foe in heaven, Or ever I had seen that day. Hamlet, Shakkspeabe. It has been wisely said that, be a man ever so heroic, he is never a hero to his valet de chambre. There is certainly no situation amongst all the many chances and changes of this troublesome world, where it is more difficult to maintain a due regard for individual dignity of character, as during those incomplete stages of the toilet to which all men alike are subjected at certain moments of their daily life. It is a period during which the vainest man alive ardently desires for solitude. There are two persons, however, whom no man can shut out from this inner sanctum of bis existence. The one is hisvalet, and the other is the wife of his bosom. I have said elsewhere that Lady Harlowe was a clever woman, and her talents were chiefly shown in the manner in which she managed a naturally unmanageable husband. She was acutely alive to the value of a judiciously chosen opportunity, and she was well aware that a man is never so completely taken at a disadvantage as when, shorn of all the superfluous trappings and external attributes of his station, he is reduced to that dead level of prosaic detail which surrounds him in his own dressing-room. Lord Harlowe, in the full panoply of a simple yet dignified evening toilet, or clad in the ponderous solemnity of frock-coat, satin stock, and gill-like shirt-collars, adorned furthermore by heavy and antique jewellery, a massive gold seal depending from his fob, an ancient and rare cameo pin decorating his bosom, and an imposing signet ring, engraved with all the family arms and quarterings, upon his li...