For in those days he was “going in for the whole thing.” He meant either to rise or to fall—so he informed the Crossenhams. His companies were now all floated; some of them, indeed, in course of winding up, and out of each, and all, the promoter either had reaped, or was hoping to reap, largely. He had a dozen irons in the fire. On the strength of his connection with the Protector, he had suddenly become a man “looked after” by those who had a “good thing” in view. As he had looked after Allan Stewart, so minor promoters now began to look after and solicit him. He dressed as Peter Black, Esquire, had never dressed before. His light summer overcoat was a work of art to be admired by clerks and porters as a “West End cut;” his boots were articles of attire to be envied; while his hats looked as though they had been that moment taken out of silk paper, and placed jauntily on his head. He had abundant leisure now for attending to the adornment of his outward man, and he did attend to it thoroughly. The Hoxton days, when he shaved before a piece of broken looking-glass, and performed the very slight ablutions to which he treated his person in a blue Delft washing-basin about six inches in diameter, were left at a convenient distance; and Peter Black, Esquire—quite another individual from the Mister Black who inhabited those wretched lodgings in a street leading out of Pitfield Street, Hoxton—had his house fitted up with hot and cold baths (which he used), while his dressing-table was furnished with as many oils, and scents, and pomades, as might have sufficed to dress up an old beauty for her three thousandth ball. All of which things Arthur remembered, and was wroth accordingly. Had his money not helped to start the Protector? and had Mr. Black not promised to go shares with him? Certainly he had told him as plainly as he could speak that he should have the half of that twenty or thirty thousand pounds he expected to make out of the Company, providing only he lent him in the first instance a hundred pounds! Arthur Dudley had neither sense enough nor wit enough to perceive the absurdity of this climax. He was awfully stupid, and he had implicitly believed, and here was the result. He had really thought he should, from one seed, reap immediately a whole field of wheat; he had really credited what a very clever and a very plausible man implied to be the fact, and many a reader will, I know, laugh at him for his credulity, or else scoff at me for drawing the portrait of an impossibly confiding man.