At first he gave two or three great dinners a year, about the height of the
fruit season, and when it was getting too ripe for carriage to London by
the old coaches--when a grand airing of the state-rooms used to take place,
and ladies from all parts of the county used to sit shivering with their
bare shoulders, all anxious for the honours of the head of the table. His
lordship always held out that he was a marrying man; but even if he hadn't
they would have come all the same, an unmarried man being always clearly on
the cards; and though he was stumpy, and clumsy, and ugly, with as little
to say for himself as could well be conceived, they all agreed that he was
a most engaging, attractive man--quite a pattern of a man. Even on
horseback, and in his hunting clothes, in which he looked far the best, he
was only a coarse, square, bull-headed looking man, with hard, dry, round,
matter-of-fact features, that never looked young, and yet somehow never get
old. Indeed, barring the change from brown to grey of his short stubbly
whiskers, which he trained with great care into a curve almost on to his
cheek-bone, he looked very little older at the period of which we are
writing than he did a dozen years before, when he was Lord Hardup.
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