“As to that, I can say nothing. I never was married, and I do not pretend to know what are the ‘cases of conscience’ discussed connubially.” “You see, Grenfell,” said the other, confidentially, “we all feel, as we have a right to feel, that we have done this man a great wrong. There has not been one single calamity of his life, from the day we broke with him, that is not traceable to us. His unfortunate line in politics, his low political associates, the depraved life some assert that he lived, and, worse than all, his wretched marriage with a poor uneducated peasant girl.” “And do you fancy that a morning call from you is the reparation for all this?” “Come, come, that is not the fair way to put it. Luttrell and I were once great friends. I was, I well know, very much his inferior in knowledge and power, but in worldliness and tact I was more than his match, and he gave way to me on every question of this sort. It may be--I’d like to think it might prove the case---that this old sentiment has not died out of his heart, that, as he used to say long ago, and people laughed when he said it, ‘Let us hear what Vyner says.’ Now, if this were so, I might even yet do something, if not for him, for that fine boy there.” “Leave that fine boy alone, Vyner, that’s my advice to you. I never saw a fellow of his years with such an overweaning self-confidence. There is, I don’t deny it, a certain ‘gentleman’ element in him, but it is dashed with something which I neither understand, nor could venture to say what it may lead to; but I repeat, leave him alone.” Vyner shook his head dissentingly, but did not speak. “Besides, let us be practical. What could you do for him? You’d not adopt him, I take it?” Vyner was silent, and he continued: “Well, then, you’d cut off the one tie he has in life, and not substitute another. Besides, don’t you remember what old Scott said at the Huxleigh steeple-chase: ‘I never back the half-bred ‘uns, no matter how well they look in training.’” “What a stickler for blood you have become,” said Vyner, laughing; and it was only as he saw the crimson flush in the other’s cheek that he bethought him how the remark might have offended. “Take your own line, then,” said Grenfell, angrily; “it doesn’t signify to me personally a brass farthing. Our dinner company with old Crab and the German Fran can scarcely but be improved, even though it be by the admixture of a little rebellion through it.” “For all that, you’d like Luttrell immensely if you met him.” “I like none but men of the world--men who know the people, the places and the things one is daily connected with--who can take up the game of society where it left off last night, and have not to read themselves up in daily life the way fellows read their history out of the _Annual Register_.”