ly as
a forerunner of greater triumphs in the future; for the personal
popularity he had achieved, the gift for leadership he had demonstrated,
the self-control he showed at all times, and the fatally adhesive
quality of his biting wit, had strengthened the Liberal party and caused
the Conservative to wish that he had never been born.

And flushed with self-love and the conquest of the woman of his desire,
he had never talked better than on that night at Arcot; nor less
offensively, for his arrogance and assertiveness were tempered by the
warm high tide of his emotions. It was a magnificent room, the
banquet-hall at Arcot, as large as that of many royal palaces, hung with
old Gobelins and frescoed by a pupil of Giotto. It was a fit setting for
the triumphant hour of the "most remarkable young man since the younger
Pitt," a phrase which, if not notably suave, at least possessed an
astonishing vigor, and was almost as familiar in American and
continental newspapers as in his own proud nation; a nation always so
keen to possess the first in all departments of excellence--creating
them out of second-class material when the first is lacking--that the
wonder was she had been so long accepting Elton Gwynne. Nothing,
perhaps, but a noble desire for a really great man restrained her.

Opposite Gwynne, the duchess, sweet and tactful, if little more than an
ornamental husk in which the juices of her race possibly recuperated to
invigorate the future generations, was as fair and stately as her castle
demanded; and if her gown was shabby her jewels were not. On either
side of her table, which occupied the central position in the great
room, were some of the most beautiful women in England, the smartest,
the most politically important; all, without exception, of an inherited
status that brought them once a year as a matter of course within the
sternly guarded portals of Arcot. Gwynne did not know that Mrs. Kaye had
knocked at these sacred portals in vain; for such gossip, if by chance
he heard it, made no impression upon him whatever. But he was by no
means insensible to the salient fact that he was one among the chosen of
Earth to-night, and that it was good to be the hero of such an assembly.

For that he was the hero there was no manner of doubt, and when the
dinner was over he spent but half an hour in the drawing-room,
preferring the conversation of the heads of state, who so seldom
gratified the vanity of a man of his years,