t any preliminary
necessity of earning it first. His father had been a fashionable
portrait-painter, and had married one of his sitters--an heiress. Oscar
and Nugent had been left in the detestable position of independent
gentlemen. The dignity of labor was a dignity unknown to these degraded
young men. "I despise a wealthy idler," I said to Oscar, with my
republican severity. "You want the ennobling influence of labor to make a
man of you. Nobody has a right to be idle--nobody has a right to be rich.
You would be in a more wholesome state of mind about yourself, my young
gentleman, if you had to earn your bread and cheese before you ate it."

He stared at me piteously. The noble sentiments which I had inherited
from Doctor Pratolungo, completely bewildered Mr. Oscar Dubourg.

"Don't be angry with me," he said, in his innocent way. "I couldn't eat
my cheese, if I did earn it. I can't digest cheese. Besides, I employ
myself as much as I can." He took his little golden vase from the table
behind him, and told me what I had already heard him tell Lucilla while I
was listening at the window. "You would have found me at work this
morning," he went on, "if the stupid people who send me my metal plates
had not made a mistake. The alloy, in the gold and silver both, is all
wrong this time. I must return the plates to be melted again before I can
do anything with them. They are all ready to go back to-day, when the
cart comes. If there are any laboring people here who want money, I'm
sure I will give them some of mine with the greatest pleasure. It isn't
my fault, ma'am, that my father married my mother. And how could I help
it if he left two thousand a year each to my brother and me?"

Two thousand a year each to his brother and him! And the illustrious
Pratolungo had never known what it was to have five pounds sterling at
his disposal before his union with Me!

I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. In my righteous indignation, I forgot
Lucilla and her curiosity about Oscar--I forgot Oscar and his horror of
Lucilla discovering who he was. I opened my lips to speak. In another
moment I should have launched my thunderbolts against the whole infamous
system of modern society, when I was silenced by the most extraordinary
and unexpected interruption that ever closed a woman's lips.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

First Appearance of Jicks

THERE walked in, at the open door of the room--softly, suddenly, and
composedly--a chubby female ch