s smile quavered. Never in all the
fifteen years since he had first found out that life was no simple
business, had he found it so singularly complicated.

CHAPTER III
DINNER AT SWITHIN'S

In Swithin's orange and light-blue dining-room, facing the Park, the
round table was laid for twelve.

A cut-glass chandelier filled with lighted candles hung like a giant
stalactite above its centre, radiating over large gilt-framed mirrors,
slabs of marble on the tops of side-tables, and heavy gold chairs with
crewel worked seats. Everything betokened that love of beauty so deeply
implanted in each family which has had its own way to make into Society,
out of the more vulgar heart of Nature. Swithin had indeed an impatience
of simplicity, a love of ormolu, which had always stamped him amongst his
associates as a man of great, if somewhat luxurious taste; and out of the
knowledge that no one could possibly enter his rooms without perceiving
him to be a man of wealth, he had derived a solid and prolonged happiness
such as perhaps no other circumstance in life had afforded him.

Since his retirement from land agency, a profession deplorable in his
estimation, especially as to its auctioneering department, he had
abandoned himself to naturally aristocratic tastes.

The perfect luxury of his latter days had embedded him like a fly in
sugar; and his mind, where very little took place from morning till
night, was the junction of two curiously opposite emotions, a lingering
and sturdy satisfaction that he had made his own way and his own fortune,
and a sense that a man of his distinction should never have been allowed
to soil his mind with work.

He stood at the sideboard in a white waistcoat with large gold and onyx
buttons, watching his valet screw the necks of three champagne bottles
deeper into ice-pails. Between the points of his stand-up collar,
which--though it hurt him to move--he would on no account have had
altered, the pale flesh of his under chin remained immovable. His eyes
roved from bottle to bottle. He was debating, and he argued like this:
Jolyon drinks a glass, perhaps two, he's so careful of himself. James,
he can't take his wine nowadays. Nicholas--Fanny and he would swill
water he shouldn't wonder! Soames didn't count; these young nephews
--Soames was thirty-one--couldn't drink! But Bosinney?

Encountering in the name of this stranger something outside the range of
his philosophy, Swithin paused.