having the right to walk into the parlour and discuss commercial affairs, which makes him furious. Here he is.
“How do, jlen? How are Consols today?”
“Now pray, Gaddy, don't. I must insist on leaving the shop east of Temple Bar.”
“ Oh, very well; only, as I had heard they had fallen three-eighths, and I have forty thousand to buy in, I thought I might tell you, and save myself a journey into the city. However, I’ll telegraph to my brokers instead.”
“ Now, Gaddy, don’t be cross. Business is business everywhere. I’ll see to it. It shall be all right. Don’t be vicious for such a trifle. Oh, Duke, may I have a word?”
There. You see in those few words he has shown his whole character. Avaricious, vain, and a cringing tuft-hunter.
“ What is it,” said an eminent pauper to me the other day, whom Glendower had been snubbing, “that makes all bankers’ sons, from Barnes Newcome to Glendower, so confoundedly offensive to me?”
“ Probably their money and the state of your balance, old fellow. When Glendower is raised to the peerage, which it is said he is about to be, with the title of Baron Pursey, he will become simply intolerable. Insolent to his inferiors, and, as a norms homo, obsequious to his peers, feigning a humility insufferable in its arrogance, we may well hope that, when White’s has opened its portals to him, he will not honour us here any longer.”
Observe that little, supercilious, dirty looking snob, who is twirling the feeble ends of a mangy, straw-coloured moustache.
That is young Penn—Inky Penn, they call him. He is the son of a country attorney, who is agent to the Earl of Propergait. They do say that Mrs. Penn was more intimate with his lordship than nice honour warranted, or than ladies ought to be who love their lords; but people spread such scandalous reports nowadays, which are always more or less eagerly listened to, that ’ to be the author of a new and successful scandal is to be a greater man than the author of ‘ Tom Jones.’ However, be that as it may. Inky shows no signs of aristocratic stock. When you dine on Guard at St. James’s, you will have an opportunity of seeing how he is beloved by his brother officers. I don’t think these gentlemen will retain him long amongst them; they object to cads, and have a way of making the regiment too hot for those they think best out of it. Hear him talk:—
“ How do, Penn?”
“ Oo! OO!” (Pennian for “How do you do?”)
“ Got a bad cold, I fear. That patrol duty these cold nights must be hard work.”
“ Oo! OO! OO!”
“Go over to Roach’s, and get some lozenges.”
Do you mark the ill-mannered and surly brute? Education? Never. If his father had sent him to Eton or Winchester, he would have been dead by this time, unless he had behaved himself very differently. He was sent to the grammar school of Duffington, his native town, where he received that useful commercial education for which it is celebrated. When the Earl announced his intention of getting him a commission in the Guards, he was removed to an expensive private tutor who prepared noblemen and gentlemen for the universities, public schools, army and navy, Royal Academy, Guy’s Hospital, and everything else. Here, amongst the well-born, well-dressed, and moderately taught half-dozen, his fellow-pupils, he might have picked up some knowledge of manners and gentlemanly bearing, both of which he so signally lacks. But he preferred the society of Sally, the carroty-headed housemaid—who, it must be confessed, had the most honourable intentions towards him, and whose character was unimpeachable—and that of the young gentlemen’s grooms, in whose company he was introduced to the pleasures of ratting, badger-drawing, cock-fighting, and bowl-of-punch drinking, in the sporting parlour of some Three Pigeons, where he was always faced by one of the right sort— as the slang phrase has it. The co-pups couldn’t stand him, and the Rev. Rose Dillwater requested his papa to take him away. Then he got his commission, and soon succeeded in insinuating himself into the hatred of everybody. But he is very different at the paternal mansion in Duffington, where, with intolerable insolence and mendacity, he recounts his successes in the fashionable world. He is the favourite partner at whist of a distinguished personage, and a frequent and honoured guest at M-H—. The attentions paid him by the female members of the aristocracy are the cause of innu-
