It has become an institution, like primogeniture, and is almost as serviceable for maintaining the proper order of things.  Rank squanders money; trade makes it;—­and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour.  The arrangement, as it affects the aristocracy generally, is well understood, and was quite approved of by the old marquis—­so that he had felt himself to be justified in eating up the property, which his son’s future marriage would renew as a matter of course.  Nidderdale himself had never dissented, had entertained no fanciful theory opposed to this view, had never alarmed his father by any liaison tending towards matrimony with any undowered beauty;—­but had claimed his right to ‘have his fling’ before he devoted himself to the reintegration of the family property.  His father had felt that...