His ironical temper and obvious poverty seemed at first ill-suited to the merchant's table, but Mrs. Clutterbuck herself forgave him when she discovered, as she immediately did, the warm heart which lay beneath these external disabilities: by the Sunday night his conversation was already absorbing; she begged him to return, and he did.
The second visit was far prolonged. They could not bear to let the merry boy go, and his frank anecdotes upon the leading men of the day, intimate acquaintance with most of whom he could proudly claim, afforded them not only amusement, but the deeper pleasure of a profound interest, and it was in connection with these that he took such frequent occasion to deride the too facile conference of titles which, as he perpetually affirmed, was the jest of the world in which he moved.
He quoted more than one case in which without any subscription to objects of public utility, wealthy men, merely because they were wealthy, had been granted a baronetcy; he joked about his work in the Heralds' College, contrasting such gewgaws as parvenus descend to buy, with the honest old yeoman crest upon the silver of his host, and was especially severe upon the establishment of fixed prices for public honours; a practice which he declared almost worse than the granting of titles to the unworthy.
Of the guests who listened to him with the respect due to an expert, few ventured to contradict or even to criticise, but it must be admitted that Sir Julius Mosher, who had been knighted years ago on the occasion of Cornelius Hertz's reception at the Guildhall, was inclined one evening at Mr. Clutterbuck's table to be a trifle interrogatory.
"I never gave a penny," he said, "and I think I may say that for most men in the City," he added, looking round the table and meeting with a murmur of approval.
"I would never dream of saying such a thing," said Nobby warmly. He blushed a little, but looked at the same time so kindly and so sincere that his embarrassment did but enhance the good opinion all had formed of the young man.
"Thank God there are still some honours left that are honours! Now, I suppose nearly all the new peers ... take the new peers ... nobody minds; and then most baronets ... since this Government came in.... Still they did pay. And I do say what I most hate in the whole affair is regular prices fixed. It isn't cricket."
"But, after all," said a Mr. Hutchinson, a doctor of considerable means, and of a solid, quiet judgment. "What do you mean by 'fixed'?" He put up his hand to dissuade interruption, and to Nobby's horror opened in the intonation of a set speech: "Remember the importance of what you are saying. Chrm! You are in the Heralds' College, and you hear a great many things. Chrm! No one denies for a moment that large subscriptions to some public object are often rewarded by some public honour.... I may be a little easy-going, but I really don't see any harm in it. Everybody knows it is—er—done; the recipients are worthy men and they are just the kind of men who have always been made knights and baronets, and even peers when they were important enough."
The brief discourse was well and clearly delivered; it earned the gratitude of all those older men around the table in whom the art of living had bred common sense and to whom short speeches at dinner were familiar; to do justice to Nobby, he was the first to let his sense of justice return.
"You mustn't take me too seriously," he said in his decent smiling way. "One talks in shorthand. I don't mean a real tariff, nobody could mean that, but I think that in the past, 'specially about ten years ago, turn of the century and with all the fuss of the war on, they did hand things about.... Oh, there were orders as well, you know."