Owing to the splendour of his imagination, which he never allowed for a moment to be dominated by facts, and to the easy and familiar way in which he spoke of the nobility, his friends had created him Duke of Long Acre. Although he preferred being called Cheyne, he answered to the name of Long Acre without any sort of resentment, or even displeasure.
One bright June morning he arose and dressed himself with peculiar care. He had business of the very first importance to transact that day. The Duke of Long Acre had at last given away his heart, and today he was to meet the lady of his choice in Hyde Park at eleven o'clock.
Mrs. Ward, an extremely slatternly woman of fifty, whom Cheyne called his housekeeper--and who came from her home in the Dials, lit his fire and got his breakfast for him of mornings, and made up his rooms, for the modest sum of five shillings a week--had toasted the bacon in a little Dutch oven, and put it on a fiery-hot plate, and made the tea for him, and set forth the milk and bread and butter.
Cheyne sat down and began his breakfast.
"This bacon is delicious, Mrs. Ward," he called out to the charwoman in the next room.
"I am glad you like it, sir."
"Delicious! I could eat a whole pig, Mrs. Ward, I think, if you cooked it."
"It is very good of you to say so, sir."
"And I am sure I don't know how it is you always get such good butter and such exceedingly good milk. I assure you, when I was staying with the Duke of Dorsetshire last summer I got much inferior butter, although he has the reputation of producing in his dairy the very finest butter of the kingdom. He told me he often sends a tub of his butter to the Prince of Wales, just in a friendly way, you know. I own his grace's butter has the full buttercup flavour; but this goes farther--this tastes of nothing but violets and cowslips."
"It ought to be good, sir; it's fivepence-halfpenny the quarter. Eating butter is eating money these times."