hip--and find a familiar comfort in them, too--three separate
lithographs of affected babies inviting any canine confidences but the
bite one desired for them, and a dismal daguerreotype of his landlady's
deceased husband, slowly perishing in pegtops and a yellow fog of
despondency, out of which only his boots and a very tall hat frowned
insistent, the tabernacles of enduring respectability:--he was content,
because he knew these were only incidents in his career--the slums to be
first traversed on a journey before the rounding breadths of open country
were reached,--and the station in life he purposed stopping at eventually
was the terminus of prosperity, intellectual and material.

With no present good fortune but the capacity for desiring it; with the
right to affix a letter or so--like grace after skilly--to his name; with
the consciousness that, having overcome theoretical pharmaceutics
masterfully, he was now combatting practical dispensing slavishly; with
full confidence in his social position (he stood under the shadow of
"high connections," like the little winged "Victory" in a conqueror's
hand, he chose to think) to help him to eventual distinction, he toasted
his toes that sour winter evening and reviewed in comfort an army of
prospects.

Also his thoughts reverted indulgently to the incidents and experiences
of the previous night.

He had had the pleasure of an invitation to one of those reunions or
seances at the house, in a fashionable quarter, of his distant
connection, Lady Barbara Grille, whereat it was his hostess's humour
to gather together those many birds of alien feather and incongruous
habit that will flock from the hedgerows to the least little flattering
crumb of attention. And scarce one of them but thinks the simple feast is
spread for him alone. And with so cheap a bait may a title lure.

Lady Barbara, to do her justice, trades upon her position only in so far
as it shapes itself the straight road to her desires. She is a carpet
adventurer--an explorer amongst the nerves of moral sensation, to whom
the discovery of an untrodden mental tract is a pure delight, and the
more delightful the more ephemeral. She flits from guest to guest,
shooting out to each a little proboscis, as it were, and happy if its
point touches a speck of honey. She gathers from all, and stores the
sweet agglomerate, let us hope, to feed upon it in the winter of her
life, when the hive of her busy brain shall be thatch