"True, I forgot. I beg your pardon!"
"Not at all! But I will fight for you some day—as soon as you like. Bear that in mind, Pynsent!"
"To be sure I will, my dear fellow. We must have you in the House. I have often said so."
And the energetic baronet hurried away, whilst Sydney entered the Club, and made straight for the smoking-room. Here he found others just as eager to predict the downfall of the Government as Sir John Pynsent had been; but he was not in the mood to listen to a number of young men all of the same mind, all of-doubtful intellectual calibre, and all sure to say what he had heard a dozen times already. So he passed on to the billiard-room, and finding that a pool was just beginning, took a ball and played.
That served to pass the time until six o'clock, when he went upstairs and read the evening papers for an hour; and at seven he had his dinner and a bottle of wine. Meanwhile he had met two or three friends, with whom he kept up a lively conversation on the events of the day, seasoned by many a pungent joke, and fatal (for the moment) to many a reputation. It is a habit fostered by club life—as, no doubt, it is fostered in the life of the drawing-room, for neither sex is exempt—to sacrifice the repute of one's absent acquaintance with a light heart, not in malice, but more as a parrot bites the finger that feeds it, in sport, or even in affection. If we backbite our friends, we give them free permission to backbite us, or we know that they do it, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. The biting may not be very severe, and, as a rule, it leaves no scars; but, of course, there are exceptions to the rule.
The secret history of almost every man or woman who has mixed at all in polite society is sure to be known by some one or other in the clubs and drawing-rooms. If there is anything to your discredit in your past life, anything which you would blot out if you could with rivers of repentance or expiation, you may be pretty sure that at some time, when you might least expect it, this thing has been, or will be, the subject of discourse and dissection amongst your friends. It may not be told in an injurious or exaggerated manner, and it may not travel far; but none the less do you walk on treacherous shale, which may give way at any moment under your feet. The art of living, if you are afraid of the passing of your secret from the few who know to the many who welcome a new scandal, is to go on walking with the light and confident step of youth, never so much as quailing in your own mind at the thought that the ground may crumble beneath you—that you may go home some fine day, or to your club, or to Lady Jane's five o'clock tea, and be confronted by the grinning skeleton on whom you had so carefully turned your keys and shot your bolts.
No doubt there are men and women so refined and kindly in their nature that they have absolutely no appetite for scandal—never speak it, or listen to it, or remember what they have overheard. Sydney and his friends were troubled by no such qualms, and, if either of them had been, he would not have been so ill-mannered as to spoil sport for the rest.
After dinner they had gone upstairs to the members' smoking room, in a comfortable corner of which they were lazily continuing their conversation. It turned by chance on a certain barrister of Sydney's inn, a Mr. Barrington Baynes, whom one of the party not incorrectly described as "that beautiful, bumptious, and briefless barrister, B. B."
"He gives himself great airs," said Captain Williams, a swaggering, supercilious man, for whom Sydney had no affection, and who was not one of Sydney's admirers. "To hear him talk one would imagine he was a high authority on every subject under the sun, but I suspect he has very little to go upon. Has he ever held a brief, Campion?"
"I never heard of it, if he did. One of those poor devils who take to journalism, and usually end by going to the dogs. You will find his name on the covers of magazines, and I fancy he does something, in the reviewing way."