Chapter 2 - Page 2

Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like mine, had
had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the young
Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in the previous generation.
When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than Gravener and I
and much more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener practically
lost one. We reacted in different ways from the form taken by what
he called their deplorable social action--the form (the term was
also his) of nasty second-rate gush. I may have held in my 'for
interieur' that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful fools,
but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking the opposite
line, for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it
would always be for reasons that differed. It came home to me that
he was admirably British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at
my bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my little
French library.

"Of course I've never seen the fellow, but it's clear enough he's a
humbug."

"Clear 'enough' is just what it isn't," I replied; "if it only
were!" That ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of
what was to be later a long ache for final frivolous rest.
Gravener was profound enough to remark after a moment that in the
first place he couldn't be anything but a Dissenter, and when I
answered that the very note of his fascination was his
extraordinary speculative breadth my friend retorted that there was
no cad like your cultivated cad, and that I might depend upon
discovering--since I had had the levity not already to have
enquired--that my shining light proceeded, a generation back, from
a Methodist cheesemonger. I confess I was struck with his
insistence, and I said, after reflexion: "It may be--I admit it
may be; but why on earth are you so sure?"--asking the question
mainly to lay him the trap of saying that it was because the poor
man didn't dress for dinner. He took an instant to circumvent my
trap and come blandly out the other side.

"Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They've an
infallible hand for frauds. All their geese are swans. They were
born to be duped, they like it, they cry for it, they don't know
anything from anything, and they disgust one--luckily perhaps!--
with Christian charity." His vehemence was doubtless an accident,
but it might have been a strange foreknowledge. I forget what
protest I dropped; it was at any rate something that led him to go
on after a moment: "I only ask one thing--it's perfectly simple.
Is a man, in a given case, a real gentleman?"

"A real gentleman, my dear fellow--that's so soon said!"

"Not so soon when he isn't! If they've got hold of one this time
he must be a great rascal!"

"I might feel