o her and her
concerns in the fashionable world. Parliament had now met, and the
party at Matching Priory,--Lady Glencora Palliser's party in the
country,--had been to some extent broken up. All those gentlemen
who were engaged in the service of Her Majesty's Government had
necessarily gone to London, and they who had wives at Matching had
taken their wives with them. Mr. and Mrs. Bonteen had seen the last
of their holiday; Mr. Palliser himself was, of course, at his post;
and all the private secretaries were with the public secretaries
on the scene of action. On the 13th of February Mr. Palliser made
his first great statement in Parliament on the matter of the
five-farthinged penny, and pledged himself to do his very best to
carry that stupendous measure through Parliament in the present
session. The City men who were in the House that night,--and all
the Directors of the Bank of England were in the gallery, and every
chairman of a great banking company, and every Baring and every
Rothschild, if there be Barings and Rothschilds who have not been
returned by constituencies, and have not seats in the House by
right,--agreed in declaring that the job in hand was too much for any
one member or any one session. Some said that such a measure never
could be passed, because the unfinished work of one session could
not be used in lessening the labours of the next. Everything must be
recommenced; and therefore,--so said these hopeless ones,--the penny
with five farthings, the penny of which a hundred would make ten
shillings, the halcyon penny, which would make all future pecuniary
calculations easy to the meanest British capacity, could never become
the law of the land. Others, more hopeful, were willing to believe
that gradually the thing would so sink into the minds of members of
Parliament, of writers of leading articles, and of the active public
generally, as to admit of certain established axioms being taken as
established, and placed, as it were, beyond the procrastinating power
of debate. It might, for instance, at last be taken for granted that
a decimal system was desirable,--so that a month or two of the spring
need not be consumed on that preliminary question. But this period
had not as yet been reached, and it was thought by the entire City
that Mr. Palliser was much too sanguine. It was so probable, many
said, that he might kill himself by labour which would be Herculean
in all but success, and that no financier af