of the sordid past, back of all the resentment, and
the sinister memory of wrongs and grievances, still unbalanced, lay an
enormous vanity.

It was the vanity in him--even in the bitter days--that throbbed with
the agony of the bright world's insolence; it was vanity which sustained
him in better days where he sat nursing in his crooked mind the crooked
thoughts that swarmed there. His desire for position and power was that;
even his yearning for corruption was but the desire for the satiation of
a vanity as monstrous as it was passionless. His to have what was shared
by those he envied--the power to pick and choose, to ignore, to punish.
His to receive, not to seek; to dispense, not to stand waiting for his
portion; his the freedom of the forbidden, of everything beyond him, of
all withheld, denied by this bright, loose-robed, wanton-eyed goddess
from whose invisible altar he had caught a whiff of sacrificial odours,
standing there through the wintry years in the squalor and reek of
things.

Now he had arrived among those outlying camps where camp-followers and
masters mingled. Certain card-rooms were open to him, certain
drawing-rooms, certain clubs. Through them he shouldered, thrilled as
he advanced deeper into the throng, fired with the contact of the crush
around him.

Already the familiarity of his appearance and his name seemed to
sanction his presence; two minor clubs, but good ones--in need of
dues--had strained at this social camel and swallowed him. Card-rooms
welcomed him--not the rooms once flung open contemptuously for his
plucking--but rooms where play was fiercer, and where those who faced
him expected battle to the limit.

And they got it, for he no longer felt obliged to lose. And that again
was a mistake: he could not yet afford to win.

Thick in the chance and circumstance of the outer camp, heavily involved
financially and already a crushing financial force, meshed in, or
spinning in his turn the strands and counter-strands of intrigue, with a
dozen men already mortally offended and a woman or two alarmed or
half-contemptuously on guard, flattered, covetous, or afraid, the limit
of Neergard's intelligence was reached; his present horizon ended the
world for him because he could not imagine anything beyond it; and that
smirking vanity which had 'squired him so far, hat in hand, now plucked
off its mask and leered boldly about in the wake of its close-eyed
master.

George Fane, unpleasantly