William Massarene did not care whether they loved him or hated him. The time had long passed when a “How do?” in the Lobby from one of them could thrill him with pleasure and pride; or a careless nod in the dusk on the Terrace send him to dinner with a joyously-beating heart. He could corner the gentlemen of the Carlton as easily as he had cornered a company in other days in Dakota. You could not buy society as you bought a corporation or a department in the States; the matter required more dressing-up and glossing over. Still, the principle of purchase remained the same, and Massarene recuperated himself for what he spent so largely in Belgravia by his commercial successes and financial fame in the City. In the freemasonry of business he had been at once recognized in the City as a Grand Master. Many a London gold broker, railway contractor, and bank chairman felt himself a mere child, a mere neophyte, when this silent, squat, keen-eyed man from the Northwest came down into the precincts of Mincing Lane and Threadneedle Street. In the City he knew his power, and made it felt. He united the American rapidity, daring, and instinct in business with the Englishman’s coldness, reserve, and prudence. The union was irresistible. He had quaked and crouched before fine ladies; but when he met the directors of the Bank of England he felt like Napoleon at Tilsit. He was a magnate in the City, whilst he was still a neophyte in the great world. But his ambitions were of another kind than those which the City gratifies. They were social and political. He meant to die a Cabinet Minister and a Peer. He went to Walmer one Easter and looked at the portraits of the Wardens. “Guess mine’ll hang there one day,” he said to himself. Everything in his new life was still, in reality, most uncomfortable to him; the very clothes he had to wear were tight and oppressive; he had to drink hocks and clarets, when he longed for gin and beer; he had to eat _salmis_ and _relevés_ when he hungered for bread and cheese and salted pork; he longed to spit on his own carpets, and dared not; he was in awe of his own servants; he was awkward and ill at ease in his own houses; he quailed before the contemptuous eye of his own secretary; and he could not read the bill of fare of his own dinners; and yet, though he pined to be once more in his shirt-sleeves, with a clay pipe in his mouth and a glass of hot grog at his elbow, he was happy in his misery, for he “had arrived.” Not arrived at the apex as yet; but in full view of it, and within an ace of planting his flag on the summit. And so in all probability he would have done in the opening years of the new century but for one of those small, very small, mistakes, which upset the chariot of successful life as the loose rivet, the weak plank, the uncovered valve destroys the stately steamship, the colossal scaffolding, the rushing and thundering steam-engine.