as
half killed. My father was at school with him; described him as
a tiger-whelp. One day he--still a fag--struck a sixth-form boy.
Sixth-form boys do not fight fags; they punish them. Louis Grayle was
ordered to hold out his hand to the cane; he received the blow, drew
forth his schoolboy knife, and stabbed the punisher. After that, he left
Eton. I don't think he was publicly expelled--too mere a child for that
honour--but he was taken or sent away; educated with great care under
the first masters at home. When he was of age to enter the University,
old Grayle was dead. Louis was sent by his guardians to Cambridge, with
acquirements far exceeding the average of young men, and with unlimited
command of money. My father was at the same college, and described him
again,--haughty, quarrelsome, reckless, handsome, aspiring, brave.
Does that kind of creature interest you, my dears?" (appealing to the
ladies).

"La!" said Miss Brabazon; "a horrid usurer's son!"

"Ay, true; the vulgar proverb says it is good to be born with a silver
spoon in one's mouth: so it is when one has one's own family crest on
it; ut when it is a spoon on which people recognize their family crest,
and cry out, 'Stolen from our plate chest,' it is a heritage that
outlaws a babe in his cradle. However, young men at college who want
money are less scrupulous about descent than boys at Eton are. Louis
Grayle found, while at college, plenty of wellborn acquaintances willing
to recover from him some of the plunder his father had extorted from
theirs. He was too wild to distinguish himself by academical honours,
but my father said that the tutors of the college declared there were
not six undergraduates in the University who knew as much hard and dry
science as wild Louis Grayle. He went into the world, no doubt, hoping
to shine; but his father's name was too notorious to admit the son into
good society. The Polite World, it is true, does not examine a scutcheon
with the nice eye of a herald, nor look upon riches with the stately
contempt of a stoic; still the Polite World has its family pride and
its moral sentiment. It does not like to be cheated,--I mean, in
money matters; and when the son of a man who has emptied its purse and
foreclosed on its acres rides by its club-windows, hand on haunch, and
head in the air, no lion has a scowl more awful, no hyena a laugh more
dread, than that same easy, good-tempered, tolerant, polite, well-bred
World which is so