This was the kingdom with whose inner mysteries Harcourt Lowther affected a fashionable familiarity. He presented his wealthy friend to the potentates of the kingdom, and carried him hither and thither to worship at numerous temples, whose distinguishing features were the flare of gas-lamps, and the popping of champagne corks, branded with the obscurest names in the catalogue of wine-growers, and paid for at the highest rate known in the London market. Perhaps in all his wanderings in the darksome wilderness which his Mentor called London life, Francis Tredethlyn’s worst sin was the perpetual “standing” of spurious sparkling wines, and the waste of a good deal of money lost at unlimited loo, or blind hookey, as the case might be. He had high animal spirits and thirty thousand a year, which common report exaggerated into sixty thousand, and which the more imaginative denizens of Bohemia multiplied into fabulous and incalculable riches; so that he met with a very cordial welcome from the magnates of the land. But the descent of Avernus, however easy it may be, is a gradual slope, and not a precipitous mountain-side, down which a man can be flung headlong by one push from a friendly hand. Francis Tredethlyn yawned in the faces of the brightest stars in the Bohemian hemisphere. His frank nature revolted against the shallow falsehoods around and about him. The glare of the gas seemed to have no brilliancy: the bloom upon the women’s faces was only so much vermilion and crimson-lake bought at the perfumer’s shop, and ghastly to look at in a sidelight. The laughter had the false ring of spurious coin; the music was out of tune. In all this little world there was no element of spontaneity; except perhaps in the uproarious gaiety of some boyish country squire making a railroad journey through some fine old property that had been kept sacred and unbroken for half-a-dozen centuries, to be squandered on a handful of pearls to melt in Cleopatra’s wine, or expended on the soaps and perfumeries of a modern Lamia. There was neither bloom nor freshness on anything except on the wings of a few pigeons newly lured into the haunts of the vulture tribe. Everything else was false, and withered, and faded. The smiles of the women, the friendship of the men, were as spurious as the rhubarb champagnes and gooseberry Moselles, and were bought and sold like them. Mephistopheles may lead his pupil to the Brocken, but he cannot compel the young man to enjoy himself amongst the wicked revellers; nor can he altogether prevent the neophyte from perceiving such small _inconvenances_ as occasional red mice hopping out of the mouths of otherwise charming young damsels.