“Is that your brilliant, witty, refined---- is that the sort of thing we should make a sacrifice to keep up?” said Edgar, as they went out together. “What an amount of trouble it has taken to produce him! And now he has to be kept up at a sacrifice. I should prefer to make a sacrifice to get rid of him, Newmarch. He is not so witty as his own groom, nor half so useful as that crossing sweeper----” “You would find the crossing-sweeper dull, too, if you met him every day,” said Newmarch. “The fact is, it is not a very good world, but it is the best we can get; and if a man does as much as he can with it---- You must get into the House, Arden. I don’t mean to say society is enough for an energetic man, with a great deal of time on his hands: but my occupations I hope are solid enough. I have had three or four hours of committees already; and I am going down to Westminster straight. Of course, it is pleasant to sit over that little table in the corner of the Thornleighs’ drawing-room. Ah!--that sort of thing is not for me,” said the legislator, with a sigh. And Edgar laughed--partly at his friend, partly at himself, partly at the universal vanity. Lord Newmarch was no Solomon. The country could have gone on all the same had he, too, gossiped over a tea-table as so many of the youth of England were doing at that moment with relish as great as though they had been so many washer-women, and tongues sharpened at the clubs. England would not have suffered had Lord Newmarch gossiped too. And Edgar was not much more genuine as he walked with him as far as Berkeley Square, and then dropped off “to say good-bye to the Thornleighs,” leaving the liveliest certainty on Lord Newmarch’s mind as to what were his relations with the family. Nor, perhaps, was Gussy more true, as she sat and filled out the tea, and saw, with a little thrill, the man coming in who was to fix her fate. She did not love him any more than he loved her, and yet, in all likelihood, her life was in his hands. What a strange, aimless whirl it was in which everybody moved, or seemed to move, as some blind fate required, and could not stop themselves, nor change the current which kept drifting them on! The crossing-sweeper was the braver and the more genuine personage. The mud cleared away before his broom; the road grew passable where he moved; he had it in his power to make a new passage wherever he was so minded. At least, so one supposed looking at his mystery from outside. Perhaps within, the guild of crossing-sweepers has its tyrannical limitations too. CHAPTER XXIV.