"Certainly not. You will have no trouble in that respect."
"I shall thus be enabled very naturally to improve acquaintance with the professional letter-writer, and find an easy opportunity to introduce the name of Louise Duval. My chief difficulty, I fear, not being a practical actor, will be to keep up consistently the queer sort of language I have adopted, both in French and in English. I have too sharp a critic in a man so consummate himself in stage trick and disguise as M. Lebeau not to feel the necessity of getting through my role as quickly as I can. Meanwhile, can you recommend me to some magasin where I can obtain a suitable change of costume? I can't always wear a travelling suit, and I must buy linen of coarser texture than mine, and with the initials of my new name inscribed on it."
"Quite right to study such details; I will introduce you to a magasin near the Temple, where you will find all you want."
"Next, have you any friends or relations in the provinces unknown to M. Lebeau, to whom I might be supposed to write about debts or business matters, and from whom I might have replies?"
"I will think over it, and manage that for you very easily. Your letters shall find their way to me, and I will dictate the answers."
After some further conversation on that business, M. Renard made an appointment to meet Graham at a cafe near the, Temple later in the afternoon, and took his departure.
Graham then informed his laquais de place that, though he kept on his lodgings, he was going into the country for a few days, and should not want the man's services till he returned. He therefore dismissed and paid him off at once, so that the laquais might not observe, when he quitted his rooms the next day, that he took with him no change of clothes, etc.
CHAPTER VIII.
Graham Vane has been for some days in the apartment rented of M. Georges. He takes it in the name of Mr. Lamb,—a name wisely chosen, less common than Thompson and Smith, less likely to be supposed an assumed name, yet common enough not to be able easily to trace it to any special family. He appears, as he had proposed, in the character of an agent employed by a solicitor in London to execute sundry commissions and to collect certain outstanding debts. There is no need to mention the name of the solicitor; if there were, he could give the name of his own solicitor, to whose discretion he could trust implicitly. He dresses and acts up to his assumed character with the skill of a man who, like the illustrious Charles Fox, has, though in private representations, practised the stage- play in which Demosthenes said the triple art of oratory consisted; who has seen a great deal of the world, and has that adaptability of intellect which knowledge of the world lends to one who is so thoroughly in earnest as to his end that he agrees to be sportive as to his means.
The kind of language he employs when speaking English to Lebeau is that suited to the role of a dapper young underling of vulgar mind habituated to vulgar companionships. I feel it due, if not to Graham himself, at least to the memory of the dignified orator whose name he inherits, so to modify and soften the hardy style of that peculiar diction in which he disguises his birth and disgraces his culture, that it is only here and there that I can venture to indicate the general tone of it; but in order to supply my deficiencies therein, the reader has only to call to mind the forms of phraseology which polite novelists in vogue, especially young-lady novelists, ascribe to well-born gentlemen, and more emphatically to those in the higher ranks of the Peerage. No doubt Graham, in his capacity of critic, had been compelled to read, in order to review, those contributions to refined literature, and had familiarized himself to a vein of conversation abounding with "swell" and "stunner" and "awfully jolly," in its libel on manners and outrage on taste.