Other feelings, too, contributed to his sense of loneliness. Birth and wealth had given him caste; but custom had not yet trained him to it. From the middle-class, staid traditions of Darnley-on-Downe he had inherited several hereditary tendencies that not the most determined efforts could eradicate. He was conscious of them; they annoyed him, they disconcerted him by making him feel more than ever that he did not match his surroundings, and this mortifying consciousness was unsupported by any such heroic glamour as that which attended the independence of his sceptical spirit. He knew that he was not careless enough in the spending of money. Spend it he did, freely and eagerly; but he always knew what it had bought, and his mind kept accounts long after he had fiercely broken himself away from the spell of pass-books and schedules. This was not as it should be. Money, to be spent correctly, should be scattered loosely, and the spender should have as little idea as possible of the way in which it has gone. Only thus can a well-bred indifference to finance be attained. The ideal of his contemporaries was to be perpetually in debt, and never to have anything whatever to show for all that had been spent. On four hundred or four hundred and fifty a year right-minded people might attain to complete destitution, bare rooms, shabby clothes, and a perpetual assumption of bankruptcy. One very popular man even achieved the result on six hundred. This was a rare triumph of extravagance, however, and a reasonable ambition would confine itself to a complete ignorance as to all outgoings. And this Kingston Darnley could never acquire. The ghost of his father stirred in him, demanding a solid recollection of every purchase. He bought the best, bought it and lavished it freely. But he never could rid himself of the knowledge that it was the best, and thus a faint suspicion of ostentatiousness hovered over all his entertainments, and the happy, slovenly wastefulness with which his contemporaries ran into debt for atrocious port or uneatable dinners could never be reached by a man with his finical instinct for perfection. This lack of carelessness, either as to quantity of pounds spent or quality of things purchased, stigmatized its owner for ever as an outsider--not to mention the fact that he invariably paid money down for all he bought. His wealth might as fairly have been blamed for this vice, perhaps; nevertheless, a hatred for debt was one of Kingston’s most inalienable legacies from Darnley-on-Downe, and, had he not been able to pay cash for the best, he would certainly have remained content to buy the worst. And this, again, was a suspicious trait in the eyes of his contemporaries, who, though quite happy to buy the worst, always made it their pride to run up bills for it that would have been exorbitant had they been ordering the best.