jumped at it."

"A very good thing--a great relief."

"Yes. He said he was very anxious for work, but he had lost ground
in this place within the last few months, and he thought that he
should do better in a fresh place, and that a fresh person would
answer better here, at least for a time. I am very sorry for him,
I have a great regard for him."

"Yes; but he is quite right to make a fresh beginning. Poor man! he
has been quite lifted off his feet, and entranced all this time, and
his recovery will be much easier elsewhere. It was all that unlucky
croquet."

"I believe it was. I think there was at first a reverential sort of
distant admiration, too hopeless to do any one any harm, and that
really might have refined him, and given him a little of the
gentleman-like tone he has always wanted. But then came the croquet,
and when it grew to be a passion it was an excuse for intimacy that
it would have taken a stronger head than his to resist."

"Under the infection of croquet fever."

"It is what my father used to say of amusements--the instant they
become passions they grow unclerical and do mischief. Now he used,
though not getting on with the Curtises, to be most successful with
the second-rate people; but he has managed to offend half of them
during this unhappy mania, which, of course, they all resent as
mercenary, and how he is ever to win them back I don't know. After