ease, and buy (by the way, we might
think of it) a famous Burgundy vineyard (for an investment), devote the
prime of your life to the discovery of a cook, your manhood to perfect
the creature's education--so forth; I imagine you are to get five years
of ample gratification (a promise hardly to be relied on) in the sere
leaf, and so perish. Take poor Jorian for an example of what the absence
of ambition brings men to. I treasure Jorian, I hoard the poor fellow, to
have him for a lesson to my boy. Witty and shrewd, and a masterly
tactician (I wager he would have won his spurs on the field of battle),
you see him now living for one hour of the day--absolutely twenty-three
hours of the man's life are chained slaves, beasts of burden, to the
four-and-twentieth! So, I repeat, fag at your German.

'Miss Penrhys retires to her native Wales; Jorian and I on to London, to
the Continent. Plinlimmon guard us all! I send you our local newspapers.
That I cut entrechats is false. It happens to be a thing I could do, and
not an Englishman in England except myself; only I did not do it. I did
appear in what I was educated to believe was the evening suit of a
gentleman, and I cannot perceive the immodesty of showing my leg. A dress
that is not indecent, and is becoming to me, and is the dress of my
fathers, I wear, and I impose it on the generation of my sex. However, I
dined Hickson of the Fourth Estate (Jorian considers him hungry enough to
eat up his twentieth before he dies--I forget the wording of the mot),
that he might know I was without rancour in the end, as originally I had
been without any intention of purchasing his allegiance. He offered me
his columns; he wished me luck with the heiress; by his Gods, he swore he
worshipped entrechats, and held a silk leg the most admirable work of the
manufactures. "Sir, you're a gentleman," says he; "you're a nobleman,
sir; you 're a prince, you 're a star of the first magnitude." Cries
Jorian, "Retract that, scum! you see nothing large but what you dare to
think neighbours you," and quarrels the inebriate dog. And this is the
maker and destroyer of reputations in his day! I study Hickson as a
miraculous engine of the very simplest contrivance; he is himself the
epitome of a verdict on his period. Next day he disclaimed in his
opposition penny sheet the report of the entrechats, and "the spectators
laughing consumedly," and sent me (as I had requested him to do) the
names of his daughters,