"Only artificial people praise the country--they feel so superior to it," said Harry Merivale, brightly, as he sat at lunch in the Union Club, where John was the guest of Major Slade. The company laughed at this statement; it was the applause that always spurred Merivale to further efforts in the preposterous. At thirty he had been considered a wit and a man of promise. Now at forty cautious men shook their heads and looked suspiciously at the flippant monologue-artist. Merivale was an advanced revolutionary on five thousand a year. Three years as private secretary to Lord Eastbourne had filled him with contempt for those who did not decorate their titles. Merivale, who developed his sense of the theatre assiduously and derived pleasure from the fact that persons thought must be descended from the famous historian of the Roman Empire, was a precisian. He pronounced his words, despite the pace of an utterance made to prevent interruption, with unction; he was as careful about their use as he was careless about their meaning. He would have sacrificed his grandmother for an epigram. His attire was as precise as his small flat in Mayfair. He hoped he was the last to preserve the traditions of the Augustan age. He read Locke "On the Human Understanding" in a room hung with choice examples of Signorelli, Lippo Lippi and Angelico. His furniture was Chippendale, his books were all leather bound. Sometimes in a long monologue on the bad government of the age, he quoted John Stuart Mill. He refused to recognise any novelist since Fielding, any musician since Handel. The last statesman died with Pitt the younger. The only persons he really respected were his valet and his banker. They both moved in the best circles. Major Slade collected his epigrams and performed the office of an enlarging mirror. He spoke of Merivale with a note of melancholy as of a man who could have been great had it not been vulgar. Merivale himself found comfort in this reflection; after all, he was, among the crowd, the one man self-possessed. His day was perfectly ordered, his trousers perfectly creased. A vellum bound copy of "Marius the Epicurean" always lay on a bedside table. He had a model bachelor's rooms, and kept a full diary. He envied the poor their indifference to dirt and despised the rich for their contempt of brains. He had a beautiful voice, an unfailing eloquence and a safe income; few men had attacked the dinner tables of Mayfair with more perfect, if restricted, assets.