“I have been some hours absent from my rooms,” apologized Sir Harry. “But this! This!” And if his face glowed before, it blazed now in the intoxication of a great victory. He wasn’t thinking of the wager he had won, and still less of the lady who was his to win: he was thinking of a fat, graceful, capricious Prince who used his male friends as he used his female, like dirt, who drove a coach with distinction and hadn’t another achievement, who had taken Harry Whitworth back into a favor that was a degradation; and Harry Whitworth thought of his restoration to that slippery foothold as a triumph and a glimpse of paradise! The Regent had forgiven him and nothing else mattered. He savored it a while, then became conscious of a shopman with a tray of jewels, and of why he came into the shop. He had the grace to lower his voice from Godaiming’s hearing as he said, “You must have finer ones than these. I desire the necklace to be of the value of one thousand guineas.” He chose, while Godalming bought his pretentious trifle, and gave Dorothy’s address. Then, “I believe that I am now entitled to the freedom of Almack’s Club, my lord,” he said. “Do you go in that direction?” And Godalming, who was not a good loser, was too sensitive to the social ascendency of the man whom the Regent forgave to decline his proffered company. The wind blowing South for Whitworth, it wasn’t desirable that word of Godalming’s wagering on its remaining North should be carried to royal ears: he had better, on all counts, make light of his loss and be seen companionably with this child of fortune. Not to mention the simpler fact that Godalming was a thirsty soul and that such a reversal of fortune as had come to Harry was only to be celebrated with high junketing. Indirectly, in his person of loser of the wager, Godalming was the host and it wasn’t proper for a host to be absent from his own table. Intrinsically, a wager of a thousand guineas was nothing to lift eyebrows at: Mr. Fox once played for twenty-two hours at a sitting and lost £500 an hour, and the celebration of a victory was what the victor cared to make it. Sir Harry had more than the winning of a bet to celebrate, he had a rehabilitation and proposed to himself the considerable feat of making Almack’s drunk. It was afternoon, but any time was drinking time, and only the darkness of mid-winter lasted long enough to cloak their heroic debauchery. Men were not rare who kept their wits and were steady on their legs after the sixth bottle, and why indeed cloak drunkenness at all, if at the seventh bottle a gentleman succumbed? There was no shame in falling in a good fight: the shame was to the shirker and the unfortunate born with a weak head, a puny three-bottle man.