Meanwhile Bruce also had made many fresh acquaintances. His reputation for immense wealth and considerable talent--his dashing easy manner--his handsome person and elaborate style of dress, attracted notice, and very soon threw him into the circle of all the young fashionables of Saint Werner's. His style of life cannot be better described than by saying that he affected the fine gentleman. Hardly a day had passed during which he had not been at some large breakfast or wine-party, or formed one of a select little body of supping aristocrats. He did very little work, and pretended to do none, (for Bruce was a first-rate specimen of the never-open-a-book genus), although at unexpected hours he took care to get up the lecture-room subjects sufficiently well to make a display when he was put on. Even in this he was unsuccessful, for scholarship cannot be acquired _per saltum_, and Mr Serjeant, the lecturer on his side, looked on him with profound contempt as a puppy who was all the more offensive from pretending to some knowledge. He told him that he might distinguish himself by hard steady work, but would never do so without infinitely more pains than he took the trouble to apply. His quiet and caustic strictures, and the easy sarcasm with which he would allow Bruce to flourish his way through a passage, and then go through it himself, pointing out how utterly Bruce had "hopped with airy and fastidious levity" above all the nicer shades of meaning, and slurred over his ignorance of a difficulty by some piece of sonorous nonsense, made him peculiarly the object of the young man's disgust. But though Mr Serjeant wounded his vanity, the irony of "a musty old don," as Bruce contemptuously called him, was amply atoned for by the compliments of the fast young admirers whom Bruce soon gathered round him, and some of whom were always to be found after hall-time sipping his claret or lounging in his gorgeous rooms. To them Bruce's genius was incontestably proved by the faultless evenness with which he parted his hair behind, the dapperness of his boots, and the merit of his spotless shirts.