“Yes,” muttered Marie to herself, “and the tall one as well; and you know it. I wonder who they are?”
Volume One—Chapter Nine.
The Slave of Fortune.
“I say, look here! You know, Litton, I’m the last man on earth to complain; but you know, damn it, you don’t do your duty by me.”
“You don’t give me credit for what I do do, Elbraham, ’pon my soul you don’t!” said the gentleman addressed—a rather fashionably-dressed, stylish young fellow of eight-and-twenty or thirty, whose hair was closely cropped in the latest style, his well-worn clothes scrupulously brushed, and his hands particularly white.
As he answered he screwed his glass very tightly into his eyes and gazed at the first speaker—a little, pudgy, high-shouldered man, with a very short neck and a very round head, slightly bald. He was carefully dressed, and a marked point in his attire was the utter absence of everything in the shape of jewellery or ornament. His fat white hands did not display so much as a ring; and though a slight prominence in his vest proclaimed the presence of a watch, it was attached to his person by a guard of the finest black silk. His countenance, however, did not match with the refinement of his attire, for it betrayed high living and sensual indulgence. There was an unpleasant look, too, about his eyes; and if to the least cultured person he had asserted in the most emphatic manner that he was a gentleman, it would not have been believed.
But, all the same, he was a man of mark, for this was Samuel Elbraham, the financier, the man who was reputed to have made hundreds of thousands by his connection with the Khedive. Men in society and on ’Change joked about Elbraham, and said that he was a child of Israel, who went down into Egypt and spoiled the Egyptians for everybody’s buying but his own. They called him Potiphar, too, and made it a subject of jest that there was no Potiphar’s wife; but they also said that it did not matter, for these were days when people had arisen who knew not Joseph.
Then they laughed, and wondered whether Potiphar of old went in for a theatre, and supplied rare subsidies of hard cash to a manager, and was very fond of taking parties of friends to his private-box to witness the last new extravaganza, after the said friends had dined with him and drunk his champagne.