With this resolution he sat down, and had soon despatched a few lines, which he carried to the post himself; then strolled out of the town for an hour, and then returned to dress, ordering a post-chaise for Tarningham House.
How different are the sensations with which one goes out to dinner at different times--ay, even when it is to the house of a new acquaintance, where we have little means of judging previously whether our day will be pleasant or unpleasant, joyous or sad. As there must be more than one party to each compact, and as the age and its object act and react upon each other, so the qualities of each have their share in the effect upon either, and the mood of the visitor has at least as much to do with the impression that he receives as the mood of the host. Wonderfully trite, is it not, reader? It has been said a thousand times before, but it will not do you the least harm to have it repeated, especially as I wish you clearly to understand the mood in which Mr. Beauchamp went, for the first time, to the house of Sir John Slingsby. It was then in that of an indifferent mood of which I have shown some indications, by describing what was passing in his mind after the baronet and Ned Hayward left him. There are, however, various sorts of indifferent moods; there is the gay indifferent, which is very commonly called, devil-me-carish-ness; then there is the impertinent indifference, with a dash of persiflage in it, just to take off the chili--as men put brandy into soda-water--which very empty and conceited men assume to give them an air of that superiority to which they are entitled by no mental quality. Then there is the indifference of despair, and the indifference of satiety. But none of these was the exact sort of indifference which Mr. Beauchamp felt, or thought he felt. It was a grave indifference, springing from a sort of morbid conviction that the happiness or unhappiness of man is not at all in his own hands, or that if it be at all so, it is only at his outset in life, and that the very first step so affects the whole course of after events, as to place the control over them totally beyond his own power. It is a bad philosophy, a very unsafe, untrue, unwise philosophy, and a great author has made it the philosophy of the devil: