Mr John Eames of the Income-Tax Office, had in three days risen so high in that world that people in the west-end of town, and very respectable people too--people living in South Kensington, in neighbourhoods not far from Belgravia, and in very handsome houses round Bayswater--were glad to ask him out to dinner. Money had been left to him by an earl, and rumour had of course magnified that money. He was a private secretary, which is in itself a great advance on being a mere clerk. And he had become the particular intimate friend of an artist who had pushed himself into high fashion during the last year or two--one Conway Dalrymple, whom the rich English world was beginning to pet and pelt with gilt sugar-plums, and who seemed to take very kindly to petting and gilt sugar-plums. I don't know whether the friendship of Conway Dalrymple had not done as much to secure John Eames his position at the Bayswater dinner-tables, as had either the private secretaryship, or the earl's money; and yet, when they had first know each other, now only two or three years ago, Conway Dalrymple had been the poorer man of the two.
Some chance had brought them together, and they had lived in the same room for nearly two years. This arrangement had been broken up, and the Conway Dalrymple of these days had a studio of his own, somewhere near Kensington Palace, where he painted portraits of young countesses, and in which he had even painted a young duchess. It was the peculiar merit of his pictures--so at least said the art-loving world--that though the likeness was always good, the stiffness of the modern portrait was never there. There was also ever some story told in Dalrymple's pictures over and above the story of the portraiture. This countess was drawn as a fairy with wings, that countess as a goddess with a helmet. The thing took for a time, and Conway Dalrymple was picking up his gilt sugar-plums with considerable rapidity.
On a certain day he and John Eames were to dine out together at a certain house in that Bayswater district. It was a large mansion, if not made of stone yet looking very stony, with thirty windows at least, all of them with cut-stone frames, requiring, let me say, at least four thousand a year for its maintenance. And its owner, Dobbs Broughton, a man very well known both in the City and over the grass in Northamptonshire, was supposed to have a good deal more than four thousand a year. Mrs Dobbs Broughton, a very beautiful woman, who certainly was not yet thirty-five, let her worst enemies say what they might, had been painted by Conway Dalrymple as a Grace. There were, of course, three Graces in the picture, but each Grace was Mrs Dobbs Broughton repeated. We all know how Graces stand sometimes; two Graces looking one way, and one the other. In this picture, Mrs Dobbs Broughton as centre Grace looked you full in the face. For this pretty toy Mr Conway Dalrymple had picked up a gilt sugar-plum to the tune of six hundred pounds, and had, moreover, won the heart of both Mr and Mrs Dobbs Broughton. 'Upon my word, Johnny,' Dalrymple had said to his friend, 'he's a deuced good fellow, has really a good glass of claret--which is getting rarer and rarer every day--and will mount you for a day, whenever you please, down Market Harboro'. Come and dine with them.' Johnny Eames condescended, and did go and dine with Mr Dobbs Broughton. I wonder whether he remembered, when Conway Dalrymple was talking of the rarity of good claret, how much beer the young painter used to drink when they were out together in the country, as they used to do occasionally, three years ago; and how the painter had then been used to complain that bitter cost threepence a glass, instead of twopence, which had hitherto been the recognised price of the article.
In those days the sugar-plums had not been gilt, and had been much rarer.
Johnny Eames and his friend went together to the house of Mr Dobbs Broughton. As Dalrymple lived close to the Broughtons, Eames picked him up in a cab. 'Filthy things, these cabs are,' said Dalrymple, as he got into the hansom.
'I don't know about that,' said Johnny. 'They're pretty good, I think.'
'Foul things,' said Conway. 'Don't you feel what a draught comes in here because the glass is cracked. I'd have one of my own, only I should never know what to do with it.'
'The greatest nuisance on earth, I should think,' said Johnny.
'If you could always have it standing ready round the corner,' said the artist, 'it would be delightful. But one would want half-a-dozen horses, and two or three men for that.'
'I think the stands are the best,' said Johnny.
They were a little late--a little later than they should have been had they considered that Eames was to be introduced to his new acquaintances. But he had already lived long enough before the world to be quite at his ease in such circumstances, and he entered Mrs Broughton's drawing-room with his pleasantest smile upon his face. But as he entered he saw a sight which made him look serious in spite of his efforts to the contrary. Mr Adolphus Crosbie, secretary to the Board at the General Committee Office, was standing on the rug before the fire.
'Who will be there?' Eames had asked of his friend, when the suggestion to go and dine with Dobbs Broughton had been made to him.
'Impossible to say,' Conway had replied. 'A certain horrible fellow by the name of Musselbro, will almost certainly be there. He always is when they have anything of a swell dinner-party. He is a sort of partner of Broughton's in the City. He wears a lot of chains, and has elaborate whiskers, and an elaborate waistcoat, which is worse; and he doesn't wash his hands as often as he ought to do.'
'An objectionable party, rather, I should say,' said Eames.