indignant, confound
Coutts and Drummond; a stray Irishman will now and then damn the
'tenantry that haven't paid up the last November'; but none, no matter
how much their condition bespeaks that out-at-elbows habit which a
ways-and-means style of life contracts, will ever confess to the fact
that their expectations are as blank as their banker's book, and that
the only land they are ever to pretend to is a post-obit right in some
six-feet-by-two in a churchyard. And yet the world is full of such
people--well-informed, pleasant, good-looking folk, who inhabit
first-rate hotels; drink, dine, and dress well; frequent theatres and
promenades; spend their winters at Paris or Florence or Rome, their
summers at Baden or Ems or Interlachen; have a strange half-intimacy
with men in the higher circles, and occasionally dine with them; are
never heard of in any dubious or unsafe affair; are reputed safe fellows
to talk to; know every one, from the horse-dealer who will give credit
to the Jew who will advance cash; and notwithstanding that they neither
gamble nor bet nor speculate, yet contrive to live--ay, and well,
too--without any known resources whatever. If English (and they are for
the most part so), they usually are called by some well-known name of
aristocratic reputation in England: they are thus Villiers or Paget
or Seymour or Percy, which on the Continent is already a kind of
half-nobility at once; and the question which seemingly needs no reply,
'Ah, vous etes parent de milord!' is a receipt in full rank anywhere.

These men--and who that knows anything of the Continent has not met such
everywhere--are the great riddles of our century; and I 'd rather give a
reward for their secret than all the discoveries about perpetual motion,
or longitude, or North-west Passages, that ever were heard of. And
strange it is, too, no one has ever blabbed. Some have emerged from this
misty state to inherit large fortunes and live in the best style; yet
I have never heard of a single man having turned king's evidence on his
fellows. And yet what a talent theirs must be, let any man confess
who has waited three posts for a remittance without any tidings of its
arrival! Think of the hundred-and-one petty annoyances and ironies to
which he is subject! He fancies that the very waiters know he is _a
sec_; that the landlord looks sour, and the landlady austere; the very
clerk in the post-office appears to say, 'No letter for you, sir,' with
a