Chapter 5

I was doubtless often a nuisance to my friends in those years; but
there were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the
hat to George Gravener. I never forgot our little discussion in
Ebury Street, and I think it stuck in my throat to have to treat
him to the avowal I had found so easy to Mss Anvoy. It had cost me
nothing to confide to this charming girl, but it would have cost me
much to confide to the friend of my youth, that the character of
the "real gentleman" wasn't an attribute of the man I took such
pains for. Was this because I had already generalised to the point
of perceiving that women are really the unfastidious sex? I knew
at any rate that Gravener, already quite in view but still hungry
and frugal, had naturally enough more ambition than charity. He
had sharp aims for stray sovereigns, being in view most from the
tall steeple of Clockborough. His immediate ambition was to occupy
e lui seul the field of vision of that smokily-seeing city, and all
his movements and postures were calculated for the favouring angle.
The movement of the hand as to the pocket had thus to alternate
gracefully with the posture of the hand on the heart. He talked to
Clockborough in short only less beguilingly than Frank Saltram
talked to HIS electors; with the difference to our credit, however,
that we had already voted and that our candidate had no antagonist
but himself. He had more than once been at Wimbledon--it was Mrs.
Mulville's work not mine--and by the time the claret was served had
seen the god descend. He took more pains to swing his censer than
I had expected, but on our way back to town he forestalled any
little triumph I might have been so artless as to express by the
observation that such a man was--a hundred times!--a man to use and
never a man to be used by. I remember that this neat remark
humiliated me almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of
broken slumbers, I hadn't often made it myself. The difference was
that on Gravener's part a force attached to it that could never
attach to it on mine. He was ABLE to use people--he had the
machinery; and the irony of Saltram's being made showy at
Clockborough came out to me when he said, as if he had no memory of
our original talk and the idea were quite fresh to him: "I hate
his type, you know, but I'll be hanged if I don't put some of those
things in. I can find a place for them: we might even find a
place for the fellow himself." I myself should have had some fear-
-not, I need scarcely say, for the "things" themselves, but for
some other things very near them; in fine for the rest of my
eloquence.

Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this
case so appropriate as he would have been had the polities of