“Now, let us try the success of this.” And she rang a bell, and despatched the note.
Lady Lackington had scarcely time to deliver a short essay on the class and order of men to which Mr. Davenport Dunn pertained, when the servant returned with the answer. It was a very formal acceptance of the invitation, “Mr. Davenport Dunn presented his compliments,”—and so on.
“Of course, he comes,” said she, throwing the note away. “Do you know, my dear, I half suspect we have been indiscreet; for now that we have caught our elephant, what shall we do with him?”
“I cannot give you one solitary suggestion.”
“These people are not our people, nor are their gods our gods,” said Lady Lackington.
“If we all offer up worship at the same temple,—the Bourse,” said Lady Grace, something sadly,—“we can scarcely dispute about a creed.”
“That is only true in a certain sense,” replied the other. “Money is a necessity to all; the means of obtaining it may, therefore, be common to many. It is in the employment of wealth, in the tasteful expenditure of riches, that we distinguish ourselves from these people. You have only to see the houses they keep, their plate, their liveries, their equipages, and you perceive at once that whenever they rise above some grovelling imitation they commit the most absurd blunders against all taste and propriety. I wish we had Spicer here to see about this dinner, it is one of the very few things he understands; but I suppose we must leave it to the cook himself, and we have the comfort of knowing that the criticism on his efforts will not be of a very high order.”
“We dine at four, I believe,” said Lady Grace, in her habitual tone of sorrow, as she swept from the room with that gesture of profound woe that would have graced a queen in tragedy.
Let us turn for a moment to Mr. Davenport Dunn. Lady Lackington's invitation had not produced in him either those overwhelming sensations of astonishment or those excessive emotions of delight which she had so sanguinely calculated on. There was a time that a Viscountess asking him thus to dinner had been an event, the very fact being one requiring some effort on his part to believe; but these days were long past. Mr. Dunn had not only dined with great people since that, but had himself been their host and entertainer. Noble lords and baronets had sipped his claret, right honorables praised his sherry, and high dignitaries condescended to inquire where he got “that exquisite port.” The tremulous, faint-hearted, doubting spirit, the suspectful, self-distrusting, humble man, had gone, and in his place there was a bold, resolute nature, confident and able, daily testing his strength against some other in the ring, and as often issuing from the contest satisfied that he had little to fear from any antagonist. He was clever enough to see that the great objects in life are accomplished less by dexterity and address than by a strong, undeviating purpose. The failure of many a gifted man, and the high success of many a commonplace one, had not been without its lesson for him; and it was in the firm resolve to rise a winner that he sat down to the game of life.
Lady Lackington's invitation was, therefore, neither a cause of pleasure nor astonishment. He remembered having met her somewhere, some time, and he approached the renewed acquaintance without any one of the sentiments her Ladyship had so confidently predicted. Indeed, so little of that flurry of anticipation did he experience, that he had to be reminded her Ladyship was waiting dinner for him, before he could remember the pleasure that was before him.