He had already spent enough money recklessly, foolishly, ay, and wickedly, to have produced an annuity of at least a thousand a year. He was professedly one of the managing directors of the Meter Works, and resided in London to take the metropolitan and continental business of the company. When his father complained of his enormous expenditure (which was very seldom, by the way), Richard Tallant alluded to his position in the world, his education, and his habits. At Oxford he had been a don, not of learning, but of fashion; kept his hunters and his mail phaeton, and made many a scion of the old aristocracy envy the mushroom son of iron and railway debentures. “You have given me every indulgence; you have bred me up in the hot-bed of luxury; I am just fresh from a European tour, where I travelled like a prince, to finish my college education, and now you expect me to pull in,” Richard would say, sitting astride one of the heavy mahogany chairs in the Westminster managerial room, and looking over the back of it at his father. “I should not care, Dick, if you would only do the work of your office, as well as draw the salary,” Mr. Tallant would remark. “Come, now, my dear governor, have you not told me you have enough invested to enable me to live like a prince all my life?” “I may have been weak enough to say so; but I calculated upon your doing something towards keeping the money coming in.” “You didn’t want me, you said, to be waiting, like some heirs, for your death, and then reckoning upon living in style; you would rather I had my fill of life, and see me enjoy it in your own days. Come now, father, you know you have said so,” said Richard, twirling his moustache, and tapping his patent-leather boot with a riding-whip. “I fear I had not my usual foresight about me when I did say so,” said Mr. Tallant. And he said truly; but having risen by hard work himself, and sprung from a comparatively humble position, Mr. Tallant was one of those men who like to see their children in the other extreme, and who, never having been within the pale of college and aristocratic life, believe, and truly, that, to be a leader therein, a merchant’s son must let his money fly freely, and like a prince indeed. He had given his son a free rein. When first Richard went to Oxford, he had been snubbed by a young lord, and an epigram had been levelled at him, the point of which turned upon his name and origin; he was called the produce of fifty talents of silver invested in iron. When Richard told his father this, the great merchant snapped his fingers, and said he could buy up all the Oxford lords in a heap, and, turning cleverly round upon their lordships, in reply to the epigrammatic hit at his son’s origin, he said,