But I need not trouble you by reading more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could not get the aristocracy, so she collected notabilities and felt herself intellectual. As you will remember, the guest of the evening was “Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, otherwise his Highness, ... the chief proprietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, with a claim of three millions and a half upon the East India Company.” The Rummum was the lion of the year and went everywhere, and the whole company was amazed when with the air of the deepest humility he saluted Colonel Newcome, who in his old-fashioned coat and diamond pin was being mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this juncture Barnes comes in and makes himself known to his uncle. The art with which the scene is drawn is consummate. Barnes behaves as a thoroughly well-bred man, greets the Colonel with unaffectedly good manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet words, and finally turns to his uncle to discuss the Rummum. “I know he ain’t a prince any more than I am.” Then Barnes warms to the subject and frankly asks the Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the Indian magnate. “The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite goodnaturedly and selfishly. Had you talked for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.” Barnes is of course the villain of the piece: but the interest in his character to us lies in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect the blending of two types, the aristocratic, with its pride and narrow exclusiveness, and the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness. In many respects the “Newcomes” is a tragedy, as is seen in Colonel Newcome’s quarrel with Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair of Rummum Loll’s Bundlecund Bank, and the _motive_ is the struggle for wealth by one of a class whose first object ought to have been honour and to whom money should have been always a secondary consideration.