Their financial embarrassments were chronic, but never interfered with their expenditure. Money was always got somehow for anything that they really wished to do. They were at all places in their due season, and their own houses never saw them except when there was a house-party to be entertained, or a royal visit to be received. True Cocky on such occasions was usually indisposed and unseen, but that fact did not greatly matter to anyone. It was an understood thing in society that he had motor ataxy, a very capricious disease as everyone knows; putting you in purgatory one day and letting you sup with ballet-girls the next. And Cocky had this useful faculty of the well-born and naturally well-bred man that he could, when he chose, pull himself out of the slough, remember his manners, and behave as became his race. But it bored him excruciatingly, and the effort was brief. The marriage, on a whole, if they had not been continually in difficulties about money, might fairly have been called as happy as most marriages are. When they quarreled it was in private, and when they combined they were dangerous to their families. She knew that she was never likely ever again to find anyone quite so reasonable, quite so useful as he. He had, immediately on their marriage, been on very good terms with her friend Harry; and when there was later on question of other friends beside Harry he did not feel half so much irritation at the fact as did Harry himself. He had learned what card it had been which she had kept up her sleeve when she had spoken with such apparent frankness as she had walked along the grass path by the Thames. But he had never made a fuss about it. He really thought Harry a very good fellow though “deuced poor, deuced poor,” he said sometimes shaking his head. Harry, too, was useful and unobtrusive, always ready to get theatre stalls, or make up a supper party, or row the stablemen if the horses got out of form, or go on beforehand to see the right rooms were taken at Homburg or Biarritz, or Nice. A good-natured fellow, too, was Harry; sort of fellow who would pawn his last shirt for you if he liked you. Cocky always nodded to him, and used his cigar-case, and sauntered with him for appearance sake down Pall Mall or Piccadilly in the most amicable manner possible. Cocky was a nursery nickname which had gone with him to Eton, and from Eton into the world, and Kenny was an abbreviation of his courtesy title which was unfortunately in use even amongst the cabmen, policemen, crossing-sweepers, and match-sellers of that district of Mayfair where he dwelt whilst awaiting the inheritance of Otterbourne House. “Jump in, boy,” said the driver of a hansom to a telegraph lad, who had hailed him at the same time as Lord Kenilworth. “Jump in, a growler’s good enough for Kenny. He wants to get slow over the ground to give my lady time with her fancy-man.”