Caring for nothing but the world, that he regarded as the golden apple hung above the head of every youth to ignore or gain, he had bought the world, with money, with charm, with honour, with talent, with beauty and strength and exulted in it and sated himself–and he did not complain of the bargain. He never complained of anything; his sweet, good humour was held by many to condone his villainies as the grace with which he took his final fall almost justified the acts which had led to that fall. When his political levity, his social extravagances, his dissipations had finally left him without health or money, he had taken the verdict of the doctors, the curses of his creditors and the flight of his friends with the same gentle smile, and, urged by his ardent love of the world to make life an adventure to the last, had disappeared from London, where he was so dazzling and infamous a figure, to die abroad, in the sun and among scenes that by their freshness and simplicity disguised, at least to a stranger’s eyes, the sharpness of their poverty. So he, by birth an English Marquis, by patent of the Pretender a Duke, son of a famous man and himself the most renowned rake in London, even among a set that included Viscount Bolingbroke, stayed his obscure wanderings at a poor inn in an unknown Spanish village and prepared himself for death among the peasants of a strange land. He regretted nothing, not the splendid chances he had thrown away, not the fine name he had tarnished, not the great talents he had wasted, not the life he had sapped and used up before its time. He admitted no sins, he claimed no virtues and he believed in no judgment. God he considered a polite myth, invented to frighten human weaknesses, the devil a fable to excuse man’s breakage of his own laws; he had never paid the least regard to either; never, in any moment of disappointment or sickness, had he felt any touch of remorse, of regret or fear. If he had been given his life over again he would have again used it for the same extravagances, the same follies, the same short brilliant flare. As he sat now, looking at the distant fig-tree and myrtle, he was thinking of his past life without compunction, though every incident that rose to his memory was connected with some broken promise, some shameless deception, some ruined heart, some wanton, dishonourable action. The one thing he had been faithful to (beyond his own Epicurean creed) was the code of a gentleman, as interpreted by the society in which he moved. It was a curious code, inherited, not learnt, an instinct more than a quality only remotely connected with the chivalry from which it had sprung. The Duke would have found this code difficult to define; he called it honour, but it was only a kind of flourishing likeness of honour.