"To think of all one knows about that hussy," he muses, as he smokes a cigar in his bedroom before dressing for dinner. By the uncomplimentary epithet he means Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. "Such a good fellow as Fred Curzon is, too, a man who might have been made anything of if she'd only treated him decently. When he married her he adored the ground she walked on, but before a week was out she began to fret him, and jar at him, and break him in, as she called it; he was too poor for her, and too slow for her, and too good for her, and she was vilely cruel to him,--it's only women who can be cruel like that, she's had more lovers than anybody living, and she's taken every one of 'em for money; nothing but money. Old Melton gave her the Park-Lane House, and Glamorgan gave her her emeralds, and Dartmoor paid her Paris bills for ten years, and Riverston takes all her stable-expenses. Everything she does is done for money; and if she puts any heart at all now into this thing with Lawrence, it is only because she's getting older and so getting jealous,--they always do as they get on,--and then she calls Russians dissolute and depraved, good Lord!" With which he casts aside his cigar, and resigns himself to his servant's hands as the second gong sounds. CHAPTER VI. The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the guest's _bien-être_, among which there is a printed paper which is always laid on the dressing-table in every room at this house: it contains the latest telegrams of public news, which come every afternoon from a London news-agency. "I dare say to the political fellows they are delightful," reflects Brandolin, as he glances down the lines, "but to me they unpleasantly recall an uncomfortable world. I don't dine the worse, certainly, for knowing that there is a revolution in Patagonia or an earthquake in Bolivia, but neither do I dine the better for being told that the French government is _destituant_ all moderate prefets in favor of immoderate ones. It is very interesting, no doubt, but it doesn't interest me, and I think the possession of these fresh scraps of prosaic news spoils dinner-conversation."