"He's the best fun out," she insisted; "you don't know him."
"You know him well?"
"He dines with us about once a week; he's taking an awful lot of trouble over our ball. I wanted you to dine and meet him."
"I'll dine with pleasure——"
"I shall ask him too. He's always inquiring after you. I thought you were rather friends at Oxford."
"We never exchanged an angry word," I said. "I don't like him all the same, though."
Yet, when I dined in Rutland Gate the following week, Crabtree was there. The household indeed revolved round him, and the majesty of Lady Dainton was subjugated by the majesty of Crabtree. I was to meet him on and off for the next ten years: on one or two occasions there was unwelcome intimacy in our relations, and, though we have now drifted apart, I still see and wonder at his faculty of success. At Oxford he was primarily the man who cadged invitations, directed other people's parties and exploited a heartiness of manner and a certain social position in the university for what they were worth in cash or its equivalents. "A man always and everywhere on the make," was Loring's definition after meeting him on the Bullingdon. As a log-roller and picker-up of unconsidered meals, he had no equal, and his activity was characterized by the most frugal spirit. Though he dined with us three or four times, we never entered his rooms in Magdalen or Long Wall, and his mode of life was to live on a social aspirant for eight weeks and then propose the spoiled Egyptian for membership of the Club. The following term saw him billeted on a new victim. It was an arrangement that suited all parties save, perhaps, the Bullingdon.
I fancy he had considerably outlived his popularity by the time he went down, and in anyone else's hands the system would have gone to pieces in a year. My excuse for this digression must be a desire to emphasize the sufficiency of his brazenness and empressement of manner to put his critics out of countenance. I can see him now, with his big loose-limbed frame, his smooth face, and black hair carefully parted in the middle—dining at someone else's expense and constituting himself the life and soul of the party. In tearing spirits, yet never losing control of himself; drinking freely, but never drunk; open, but never candid; careless, but never off his guard—he was a disconcertingly cold and calculating man, clever and technically honest, though I would trust him no further than I could see him. After coming down he went to the Bar and pushed his way into a fair practice; several years later he married a widow rather older than himself, and, as his first public act was to appear as Conservative candidate in one of the Glasgow divisions, I infer that his wife had money. Immediately after the outbreak of war I found him hurrying through the Horse Guards in a staff captain's uniform. Though doubtful of his ability to "tell at sight a chassepot rifle from a javelin," I was in no way surprised.
His career is still young, and he has hardly aged at all since the night when I met him at dinner in Rutland Gate. I have no idea how long he had been known to the family, but it was pretty to see him slap Sir Roger on the back, to hear him call Sonia by her Christian name or address his host as "Dainton." He was prolific of suggestions for the forthcoming ball, drawn largely from experience of what was done by "my cousin Lord Beaumorris" at some period, I imagine, before that nobleman's second and latest bankruptcy.