there is no harm I can perceive in leading the fashion—­none that I see in having a consummate style.  I know your taste, and hers, Richie, the noble lady’s.  She shall govern the intellectual world—­your poets, your painters, your men of science.  They reflect a beautiful sovereign mistress more exquisitely than almost aristocracy does.  But you head our aristocracy also.  You are a centre of the political world.  So I scheme it.  Between you, I defy the Court to rival you.  This I call distinction.  It is no mean aim, by heaven!  I protest, it is an aim with the mark in sight, and not out of range.’

He whipped himself up to one of his oratorical frenzies, of which a cheque was the common fruit.  The power of his persuasiveness in speech, backed by the spectacle of his social accomplishments, continued to subdue me, and I protested only inwardly even when I knew that he was gambling with fortune.  I wrote out many cheques, and still it appeared to me that they were barely sufficient to meet the current expenses of his household.  Temple and I calculated that his Grand Parade would try the income of a duke, and could but be a matter of months.  Mention of it reached Riversley from various quarters, from Lady Maria Higginson, from Captain Bulsted and his wife, and from Sir Roderick Ilchester, who said to me, with fine accentuation, ‘I have met your father.’  Sir Roderick, an Englishman reputed of good breeding, informed the son that he had actually met the father in lofty society, at Viscountess Sedley’s, at Lady Dolchester’s, at Bramham DeWitt’s, and heard of him as a frequenter of the Prussian and Austrian Embassy entertainments; and also that he was admitted to the exclusive dinner-parties of the Countess de Strode, ‘which are,’ he observed, in the moderated tone of an astonishment devoting itself to propagation, ‘the cream of society.’  Indubitably, then, my father was an impostor:  more Society proved it.  The squire listened like one pelted by a storm, sure of his day to come at the close of the two months.  I gained his commendation by shunning the metropolitan Balls, nor did my father press me to appear at them.  It was tacitly understood between us that I should now and then support him at his dinner-table, and pass bowing among the most select of his great ladies.  And this I did, and I felt at home with them, though I had to bear with roughnesses from one or two of the more venerable dames, which were not quite proper to good breeding.  Old Lady Kane, great-aunt of the Marquis of Edbury, was particularly my tormentor, through her plain-spoken comments on my father’s legal suit; for I had to listen to her without wincing, and agree in her general contempt of the Georges, and foil her queries coolly, when I should have liked to perform Jorian DeWitt’s expressed wish to ’squeeze the acid out of her in one grip, and toss her to the Gods that collect exhausted lemons.’  She took extraordinary liberties with me.