So that at thirty-two, with a wife whom already people regarded as likely to be the making of him, a model landlord, perfectly sure of a seat in the House, without a characteristic of any kind or an enemy in the world, there, gentle and exquisitely groomed, Dudley Leicester was a morning or so after his return to town. Standing in front of his mantelshelf in a not too large dining-room of Curzon Street, he surveyed his breakfast-table with an air of immense indifference, of immense solitude, and of immense want of occupation. His shoulder-blades rubbed the glass front of the clock, his hand from time to time lightly pulled his moustache, his face was empty, but with an emptiness of depression. He had nothing in the world to do. Nothing whatever! So that turning round to take a note from the frame of the mirror behind him was with him positively an action of immense importance. He hadn’t a visit to pay to his tailor; there wouldn’t be at his club or in the Park anyone that he wanted to be talked to by. The one bright spot in his day was the P---- exercise that he would take just before lunch in his bath-room before the open window. This interested him. This really engrossed him. It engrossed him because of his docility, his instructor having told him that, unless he paid an exact attention to each motion of his hands and wrists the exercises would cause him no benefit whatever. He longed immensely for physical benefit, for he suffered from constant panics and ideas of ill-health. He remembered that he had an aunt who had been a consumptive; therefore he dreaded tuberculosis. He had read in some paper that the constant string of vehicles passing us in the streets of London so acted on the optic nerves that general paralysis was often induced. Therefore sometimes he walked along the streets with his eyes shut; he instructed his chauffeur to drive him from place to place only by way of back streets and secluded squares, and he abandoned the habit of standing in the window of his club, which overlooked Piccadilly. Because Pauline, by diverting his thoughts, diverted also these melancholy forebodings, he imagined that marriage had done him a great deal of good. The letter that he took from the mantelshelf contained an invitation from the Phyllis Trevors to dine that night at the Equator Club, and to go afterwards to the Esmeralda, the front row of whose stalls Phyllis Trevors had engaged. That matter was one for deep and earnest consideration, since Dudley Leicester had passed his last three evenings at the place of entertainment in question, and was beginning to feel himself surfeited with its particular attractions. Moreover, the Phyllis Trevors informed him that Etta Stackpole--now Lady Hudson--was to be one of the party. But, on the other hand, if he didn’t go to the Phyllis Trevors, where in the world was he to spend his evening?