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vengeance! And yet real goodwill underlies the guardedness of his disrespectable sermon. As, however, he sinks back in his chair, and plumes himself on the communique, it never strikes him for an instant that this wild and unfortunate girl is quite capable of distancing her tutor and of swaying larger destinies than his. His main and constant object was never to appear ridiculous. So absurd a forecast would have irretrievably grotesqued him in his own eyes and in those of his friends. His attitude towards women appears best from his reflections nearly five years later, which read like a page of La Rochefoucauld tied up with red tape:—
    ". . . With women, I observe they have only resource in Art, and there is to them no interval between plain ground and the precipice; and the springs of action are so much in the extreme of sublime and low, that no absolute dependence can be given by men. It is for this reason I always have anticipated cases to prepare their mind to reasonable conduct, and it will always have its impression, altho' they will fly at the mere mention of truth if it either hurts their pride or their intrest, and the latter has much more rarely weight with a young woman than the former; and therefore it is like playing a trout to keep up pride to make them despise meaness, and not to retain the bombast which would render the man who gave way to 'it the air of a dupe and a fool. It requires much conduct to steer properly, but it is to be done when a person is handsome, and has a good heart; but to do it without hurting their feelings requires constant attention; it is not in the moment of irritation or passion that advice has effect; it is in the moment of reason and good nature. It reduces itself to simple subjects; and
    Memoirs—Vol. 14—2

    when a woman can see more than one alternative of comfort or despair, of attention and desertion, they can take a line." *
    Thus Greville—the prudent psychologist of womankind and the nice moralist of the immoral. His metaphor of the " trout " must have appealed to that keen fisherman, his " dear Hamilton." Greville angled for " disinterested " hearts with a supple rod. His " system " was to attach friendship rather than to rivet affection; to " play " a woman's heart in the quick stream of credulous emotion past the perilous eddies of headlong impulse with the bait of self-esteem, till it could be safely landed in a basket, to be afterwards transferred for the fish's own benefit to a friend. If the trout refused thus to be landed, it must be dropped into the depths of its own freward will; but the sportsman could at least console himself by the thought that, as sportsman, he had done his duty and observed the rules of his game. Greville was already contemplating a less expensive shrine for his minerals and old masters. He was anxious to be quit of Portman Square, and a light purse proverbially makes a heavy heart.
    He must be left calculating his chances, while his Dulcinea books places in the Chester coach, weeps for joy, and kisses her Don Quixote's billet with impetuous gratitude.
    *Morrisorv MS. 156, November (?) 1786.

    CHAPTER II
    " THE FAIR TEA-MAKER OF EDGWARE ROW "
    March 1782— August 1784
    AjrIRLISH voice, fresh as the spring morning on Paddington Green outside, with its rim of tall elms, and clear as the warbling of their birds, rings out through the open window with its bright burden of " Banish sorrow until to-morrow." The music-master has just passed through the little garden-wicket, the benefactor will soon return from town, and fond Emma will please him by her progress. Nature smiles without and within; " Mrs. Cadogan " bustles over the spring-cleaning below, and to-morrow the radiant housewife will take her shilling's-worth of hackney coach as far as Romney's studio in Cavendish Square. She is very happy; it is almost as if she were a young bride; perchance, who knows, one day she may be Greville's wife. In her heart she is so now; and yet at times