true that is! Certainly too far."

Apart from the congeniality of political sentiment, there were other
points of friendly contact between the older and younger man. Each was
an exceedingly pleasant man of the world; and, though Leopold Travers
could not have plumbed certain deeps in Chillingly Gordon's nature,--and
in every man's nature there are deeps which his ablest observer cannot
fathom,--yet he was not wrong when he said to himself, "Gordon is a
gentleman."

Utterly would my readers misconceive that very clever young man, if they
held him to be a hypocrite like Blifil or Joseph Surface. Chillingly
Gordon, in every private sense of the word, was a gentleman. If he had
staked his whole fortune on a rubber at whist, and an undetected glance
at his adversary's hand would have made the difference between loss and
gain, he would have turned away his head and said, "Hold up your cards."
Neither, as I have had occasion to explain before, was he actuated
by any motive in common with the vulgar fortune-hunter in his secret
resolve to win the hand of the heiress. He recognized no inequality of
worldly gifts between them. He said to himself, "Whatever she may give
me in money, I shall amply repay in worldly position if I succeed, and
succeed I certainly shall. If I were as rich as Lord Westminster, and
still cared about being Prime Minister, I should select her as the most
fitting woman I have seen for a Prime Minister's wife."

It must be acknowledged that this sort of self-commune, if not that of
a very ardent lover, is very much that of a sensible man setting high
value on himself, bent on achieving the prizes of a public career, and
desirous of securing in his wife a woman who would adorn the station
to which he confidently aspired. In fact, no one so able as Chillingly
Gordon would ever have conceived the ambition of being Minister of
England if in all that in private life constitutes the English gentleman
he could be fairly subject to reproach.

He was but in public life what many a gentleman honest in private life
has been before him, an ambitious, resolute egotist, by no means without
personal affections, but holding them all subordinate to the objects
of personal ambition, and with no more of other principle than that
of expediency in reference to his own career than would cover a silver
penny. But expediency in itself he deemed the statesman's only rational
principle. And to the consideration of expediency he br