All this about what Iris might have done has its place because, had she strayed out of her accustomed path more determinedly, she would have seen more of Roger Poole; who--and ever with that peculiar and antagonising air of a man with a fine sense of conduct and deportment who knew himself to an exact and rigorous shade--was in the most inner background of these feverish activities, though never too feverishly; who was as much at home with our more presentable celebrities as with those less efficient; and who, in the rather different atmosphere round about St. James's, was known as a very cool and fortunate gambler; and had once been heard to make the profound paradox that "a good gambler never takes any risks"--which, it was said, had so impressed a certain very rich young fool with its apparent impossibility that he had at once married an elderly millionairess. Roger intended, in brief, to revive in himself and his station a certain tradition; and with no affectation, for that tradition was his very own and became him as none other could; in fact, it became him as well or as ill as it had once become the younger politicians of a past century. It had needed little perspicacity on his part to see that there was a strange defect in the young men of his generation; that they seemed quite unable and unwilling to combine their abandon with any such brilliance as might help them to achieve something, or their brilliance with enough abandon to make them seem sympathetic fellows--that, in short, they were either wasters or dons. They seemed quite unable to accommodate their pleasures and their business into one lurid whole, as did those men in the days when there were still clubs in St. James's Street and not curiosities; when men of brains or birth never so entirely forgot their self-respect or breeding were they ever so debauched, as to be wholly indifferent to the politics or culture of their country; when it was as nothing against a gentleman to have it said against him that he had seduced a friend's wife, so only he had wittily done the same to the House of Commons on the same night; when, in short, it was commonly considered the part of a gentleman to be interested in upholding or demolishing the pillars of the constitution....