“Then you’ll let it sink?”
“Most unquestionably.”
“I s’pose you’re right.”
“Well, rather. I can stand a good deal but Irish cousins. As the Princess Huncomun says in ‘Tom Thumb,’ ‘I shudder at the gross idea.’”
“It would never do, Percival—never, never.” And wagging his empty head sagaciously, Mr. Minniver again dipped his beak in the juice of the grape.
Mr. Eugene Percival is a swell of the first water; a bureaucrat in the most exalted sense of the term; a clerk in the Foreign Office, with expectations of a third secretaryship at no distant date. His mother, an heiress, died in giving him birth; his father, a captain in the Seventeenth Lancers, fell in the bloody ride of death at Balaklava. A guardian took possession of the boy, and, having placed him at Eton, later on transplanted him to Cambridge, where he took a degree, making a fair fight for honors. The failure of the banking firm of Overend & Gurney, of Lombard Street, deprived Percival of over half his property, and then he resolved upon work.
“I cannot live upon fifteen hundred a year and idleness,” he said.
“I could live, and live well, on a hundred a year with work.”
Through the influence of no less a personage than Benjamin Disraeli he was installed at the Foreign Office at a nominal salary, and the evening upon which this story opens he was twenty-five years of age, five feet eight inches in height, with yellow hair closely cropped, as is the fashion amongst the golden youth of the present hour, his eyes dark blue, his nose a delicate aquiline, his mouth and teeth unexceptionable, and the whole man bearing the unmistakable stamp of gentleman.
A few days subsequent to the receipt of his Irish letters Mr. Eugene Percival strolled from the Garrick into Covent Garden Market, but little altered in its appearance since the days when Sam Johnson and Topham Beauclerk went on a rouse amongst the vegetable wagons, and at unhallowed hours, as the worthy lexicographer subsequently—and sorrowfully—admitted.