Harcourt Lowther found it very hard work to keep Francis Tredethlyn amused, night after night, in remote and unapproachable regions, whose very names were only to be spoken in hushed accents over the fourth bottle of Chambertin or Clos Vougeot at a bachelor’s dessert. Poor Frank would rather have been dancing attendance upon his wife, and trampling on the silken trains of stern matrons and dowagers at the dullest “Wednesday,” or “Tuesday,” or “Saturday,” in all the stuccoed mansions in which Maude’s pretty face and pleasant manners, and his own good old Cornish name and comfortable income, had secured his footing. He was very good-natured, and did not care how much bad wine he was called upon to pay for. He could lose a heavy sum at blind hookey without the faintest contraction of his black eyebrows, or the smallest depression of his lower jaw. But he did not enjoy himself. He did not enjoy himself--and yet somehow or other he went again and again to the same temples, always under convoy of his friend Harcourt, and generally very firmly resolved that each visit should be the last. But there was always some special reason for another visit--an appointment with some elegant acquaintance of the vulture tribe, who wanted his revenge at blind hookey; or a little dinner to be given at the Star and Garter, in honour of some beautiful Free-Lance, whose chief fascinations were the smoking of tissue-paper cigarettes and a vivacious disregard of Lindley Murray. There was always some engagement of this kind; and as it happened somehow that Francis Tredethlyn generally found himself pledged to act as paymaster, it would of course have been very unmanly to draw back. If he could have sent his friend Lowther and a blank cheque as a substitute for his own presence, he would gladly have done so; but his friend Lowther took care to make that impossible. So the matter always ended by Mr. Tredethlyn finding himself, at some time on the wrong side of midnight seated at the head of a glittering dinner-table; with the ruins of an expensive dessert and the faces of his guests only dimly visible athwart a thick and stifling vapour of cigar smoke; while the clamour of strident laughter mingled with the occasional chinking and clattering of glass, as some applauding hand thumped its owner’s approval of the florid sentiments in an eloquent postprandial oration. It is impossible to be perpetually paying for sparkling wines without occasionally drinking a little too freely of their bubbling vintage. Francis Tredethlyn, under the influence of unlimited Moet or Clicquot, found the Bohemians a much pleasanter kind of people than when he contemplated them in the cold grey morning light of sobriety. Harcourt Lowther took care that his friend should pretty generally look at things through a rose-tinted medium engendered of the juice of the grape; for he found that it was by this means alone that he could retain his hold upon his pupil.