Rich and handsome in high degree, he began to find London a very pleasant and companionable place, without the ostentatious thoughtlessness of Oxford, or the frank intellectual apathy of his home. In point of fact, London began to do for him what neither home nor Oxford had succeeded in doing. Gradually he grew down to his own level, his edges were rubbed off, his generous, exaggerated ideas dwindled to their proper place in the perspective of life. He realized that to live well and beautifully it is not necessary to be for ever examining the foundations of action; that life is simple and enjoyable for those who prefer living it to discussing it; that justice, while august and unattainable in the abstract, and astonishingly contradictory in its precepts, is yet, in the concrete, very easily discerned and followed in this workaday sphere by plain-minded people whose eyes are fixed, not on the stars in high heaven, but on their reflection in the muddy ways of the world. He ceased to nourish fantastic theories against the hanging of murderesses, conceived the possibility of good in vivisection, and began at last to contemplate a Piccadilly midnight with the not unkindly stoicism of a man of the world. Inwardly, as he often told himself, his ideas remained the same, but their outward manifestation grew calmer and more ordinary. When he met his Oxford friends he found that he was much more in sympathy with their way of taking life as a matter of course. Meanwhile Lady Adela was bent on seeing him safely married. This, she considered, was the easiest and most desirable way of protecting him against all the wicked possibilities that lie in wait for a young man. To save him from the contamination of many women by tying him tight to one, before he had had time to look about and make his choice, seemed to her a very prudent, not to say holy, course. So she paraded desirable damsels before him, and held amicable counsel with mothers not at all averse from an alliance with Kingston Darnley’s wealth. The mothers and Lady Adela worked and manœuvred with Machiavellian cunning; needless to say, their designs would have been plain to a sucking child; and, equally needless to say, Kingston, pleased and flattered, lent himself more or less amiably to their strategy, with a guilelessness that quite reassured them as to his ignorance of their purposes.