Lady Wimpole was now free, except for the encumbrance of her low-bred husband who had virtually retired, master of a colossal fortune by means of which he proposed to live up to his new estate.
LORD HORACE WIMPOLE
“As a business man he was a success, for he ran true to type,
but as an aristocrat he was a hopeless false-alarm.”
Lord Horace Wimpole
It was here he made his fatal error. As a business man he was a success, for he ran true to type, but as an aristocrat he was a hopeless false-alarm. Contrary to previous statements, in matters of breeding kind hearts can not compare with coronets, particularly when the latter have been in the family for ten generations.
Finding himself a failure in the fields of sport, riding to or from the hounds, cricket and the active exercises, intellectually unable to compete in cultural pursuits such as the writing of memoirs or the collecting of sea shells and butterflies, Wimpole was thrown back on the last recourse of affluent ignorance, travel and dissipation.
In the latter field he showed a natural aptitude which, had it been caught and cultivated in some previous generation, might have made him a rather attractive rake. But it came too late; he was merely beastly. Lady Wimpole was quite frank about it.