got her penny. The
opposite gentleman when once by a glance he had expressed submission
was allowed his own way with his legs and with the window. I would
not say that Ferdinand Lopez was prone to do ill-natured things; but
he was imperious, and he had learned to carry his empire in his eye.

The reader must submit to be told one or two further and still
smaller details respecting the man, and then the man shall be allowed
to make his own way. No one of those around him knew how much care he
took to dress himself well, or how careful he was that no one should
know it. His very tailor regarded him as being simply extravagant in
the number of his coats and trousers, and his friends looked upon him
as one of those fortunate beings to whose nature belongs a facility
of being well dressed, or almost an impossibility of being ill
dressed. We all know the man,--a little man generally who moves
seldom and softly,--who looks always as though he had just been sent
home in a bandbox. Ferdinand Lopez was not a little man, and moved
freely enough; but never, at any moment,--going into the city or
coming out of it, on horseback or on foot, at home over his book or
after the mazes of the dance,--was he dressed otherwise than with
perfect care. Money and time did it, but folk thought that it grew
with him, as did his hair and his nails. And he always rode a horse
which charmed good judges of what a park nag should be;--not a
prancing, restless, giggling, sideway-going, useless garran, but an
animal well made, well bitted, with perfect paces, on whom a rider if
it pleased him could be as quiet as a statue on a monument. It often
did please Ferdinand Lopez to be quiet on horseback; and yet he did
not look like a statue, for it was acknowledged through all London
that he was a good horseman. He lived luxuriously too,--though
whether at his ease or not nobody knew,--for he kept a brougham of
his own, and during the hunting season he had two horses down at
Leighton. There had once been a belief abroad that he was ruined, but
they who interest themselves in such matters had found out,--or at
any rate believed that they had found out,--that he paid his tailor
regularly: and now there prevailed an opinion that Ferdinand Lopez
was a monied man.

It was known to some few that he occupied rooms in a flat at
Westminster,--but to very few exactly where the rooms were situate.
Among all his friends no one was known to have entered them. In a
mode