"When you are my age," said Lucius with the superior wisdom of an elder brother, "you will cease to judge by externals, I trust. You will have learned to peep behind the veil, and you will see the real soul seated on its throne."
"Bosh!" said George shortly.
And so the idle talk went on, and Lucius continued to pose, while the worshipper of nature took pains to fit on the Philistine's skin tighter than ever.
CHAPTER II.
AT MONTE CARLO.
Mr. Maurice Capt, though an ambitious man and a clever one withal, had risen no higher in the world since we saw him last; he was still Reginald Haggard's valet, but his wages were good and he had a little den of his own where his meals were served to him from the housekeeper's table in solitary state. The valet was by this time a man of property; his wants were few and his little economies, as he called them, were large. Nobody but his banker was aware of the extent of his accumulations; he couldn't have saved it all out of his pay, but he had managed to amass a comparatively large sum which stood to his credit in four figures. Was Mr. Capt a gambler, a backer of horses, or a dabbler in stocks and shares? Not a bit of it. Mr. Maurice Capt was the proprietor of a secret. For seventeen years Mr. Capt had drawn from this queer property of his a varying but comfortable income. When Lucy Warrender first came into her eight hundred a year, Mr. Capt's income had very sensibly increased. It wasn't paid quarterly or half-yearly; the manner in which it was drawn was sufficiently original. The bills which Mr. Capt drew whenever he thought fit upon Miss Lucy Warrender were always honoured. Mr. Capt was in the habit of writing to the lady in the humble tone of a suppliant. The letters always stated with praiseworthy clearness what was the sum required, and the demand was always met with business-like promptitude. How Miss Warrender managed to satisfy this insatiable bloodsucker I cannot tell, for though she had eight hundred a year of her own, she certainly lived up to it, perhaps beyond it. But Miss Warrender gambled in many ways; she speculated and had quite a large account which she had opened with a very old friend of former years, Mr. Dabbler, once of the firm of Sleek and Dabbler, but now trading by himself, and though dropping his h's as freely as ever, one of the biggest brokers on the Stock Exchange and an alderman of the City of London. I suppose Alderman Dabbler must have been very much in love with Miss Warrender, though he never actually had the impertinence to propose to her. Her transactions with him were numerous, and did not pass through his books. Most of her speculations were made upon his advice, and many a handsome cheque testified either to the astuteness of Miss Lucy Warrender, or to the generosity of Mr. Alderman Dabbler. Poor Dabbler, he was but one of the many irons in Miss Warrender's fire. Miss Warrender betted; it was even said that she ran horses as "Mr. Simpson." She would stand upon the plateau at Monaco at the shooting matches, and in an entrancing costume and a pair of ten-button gloves, her face carefully shaded from the blazing sun by an enormous parasol, she would watch the birds fall right and left and die in agony, or drop wounded into the sea, and still continue to back the bird or the gun, as seemed to her good, with the cosmopolitan habitués of the rather Bohemian but money-spending set in which she moved. It was a very miscellaneous set: peers, members of parliament, journalists, jockeys, people who lived by their wits but who somehow always managed to wear new garments of fashionable cut, actresses, singers, dancers, of European reputation, and some of them with no reputations at all, fashionables of enviable notoriety or the reverse; all these various sorts of people were hail-fellow-well-met with Miss Warrender upon the Plateau at Monte Carlo, or within the walls of the great gambling house.
Lucy Warrender had kept her good looks; I expect if she hadn't she would have gone under long before. She enjoyed herself in a sort of feverish way; she was a notoriously lucky woman when she gambled, and she gambled habitually and heavily. But just on the particular day we meet Miss Warrender again, Fortune had been unkind. The lady was sitting gazing out from her window on the second floor of the Hotel de Russie upon the sunlit tranquil turquoise sea. I don't think that she saw much beauty in the scene, for though she stared at the blue sea and the bluer sky, she appeared to be rapt in thought.