The house in Regent's Park, with its large and decorous, too decorous, rooms, and gardens down to the water (is it river or lake? One only saw it at night, and then not very clearly, when it was either beautiful or sombre) became a more frequent scene of parties than any other responsible dwelling in London: a kind of holocaust of drink, cards, and dancing from which one emerged an entirely different person to the one who had entered a few hours before. One never entered that house without drinking more than one had ever drunk before, the thing was somehow in the atmosphere, and time over again one heard some poor wretch tell another that he had never been so drunk since Oxford. But the frequent parties were not merely rowdy affairs, though rowdiness was never far absent for those who liked that sort of thing. Roger, as I've said, knew what he was about; and now there was forming around him, around the card-tables and the buffets, a small but dominating nucleus of people whose serious purposes were decently shielded, let's say, rather than submerged, by the riot and extravagance of the passing moment. He was becoming, in fact, the leader of a new old-school: and one as inimical to wasters as it was indifferent to dullards. From the, after all, considerable eminence of his means and position he was influencing the most promising of his contemporaries and juniors to what he considered a useful, sympathetic, and amusing mode of life: to think well and to live well, to live hard and to work hard.... Not, if you look full at it, a very elevating philosophy, not very original, since Haroun-al-Raschid lived and died so many years ago. But, elevating or no, it was one with a deal of practicable arrogance in it, and it is surprising how people will be influenced by anything that appeals practicably to their arrogance. And, I suppose, it is not so difficult as all that to influence people to one's own conception of life if one has Roger Poole's advantages; not only those of his means and his abilities but, as definitely, of his looks and air; and, to top it all, the possession of such a wife--an advantage more vivid and compelling than any he could find in himself. Of course I took it for granted that she was happy during that year! She seemed supremely content--as why, one might ask, shouldn't she be? Of all the men who had and might have come her way, Roger Poole, in spite of his indulgences in cards and brandy-and-ginger-ale, was certainly the most distinguished and eligible; and, what's more, the most courteous and considerate of husbands, who so far forgot the sardonic reticence one had thought natural to him as to seem, even in public, always to be making love to his wife.