And as she went, he drew out a cigar from his silver case with rather shaking fingers, and pretended to be absorbed in lighting it. When it was finally lit and he looked up, she was gone. With a sigh, he flung himself into an arm-chair and puffed away at his choice Havana in a sore and miserable confusion of mind. No human being, perhaps, is quite so sore and miserable as a man who is born with the instincts of a gentleman and yet conducts himself like a cad. There are many such tramps of a decayed and dying gentility amongst us—men with vague glimmerings of the ancient chivalry of their race lying dormant within them, who yet lack the force of will necessary to plan their lives resolutely out upon those old-fashioned but grand foundations known as truth and loyalty. Because it is ‘the thing’ to talk slang, they pollute the noble English language with coarse expressions copied from stable conversation; and because it is considered ‘swagger’ to make love to other men’s wives, they enter into this base form of vulgar intrigue almost as if it were a necessary point of dignity and an added grace to manhood. If we admit that men are the superior and stronger sex, what a pitiable thing it is to note how little their moral forces assist in the elevation of woman, their tendency being to drag her down as low as possible! If she be unwedded, man does his best to compromise her; if he has married her, he frequently neglects her; if she be another’s wife, he frequently tries to injure her reputation. This is ‘modern’ morality, exhibited to us in countless varying phases every day, detailed every morning and evening in our newspapers, witnessed over and over again through every ‘season’s’ festivities; and this, combined with atheism, and an utter indifference as to the results of evil, is making of ‘upper class’ England a something worse than pagan Rome was just before its fall. The safety of the country is with what we elect to call the ‘lower classes,’ who are educating themselves slowly but none the less surely; but who, it must be remembered, are not yet free from savagery,—the splendid brute savagery which breaks out in all great nations when aristocratic uncleanness and avarice have gone too far,—a savagery which threw itself panting and furious upon the treacherous Marie Antoinette of France, with her beauty, her wicked wantonness, her thoughtless extravagance and luxury, and her cruel contempt for the poor, and never loosened its fangs till it had dragged her haughty head to the level of the scaffold, there to receive the just punishment of selfishness and pride. For punishment must fall sooner or later on every wilful misuser of life’s opportunities; though had anyone told Lord Carlyon this by way of warning, he would have bidden him, in the choicest of ‘swagger’ terms, to ‘go and be a rotten preacher!’ And in saying so, he would have considered himself witty. Yet he knew well