Despite Sir Joseph's very careful reservations in regard to the increase, which unsolicited he had thought fit to make in his chief secretary's salary, Denis, who was perfectly well aware of his own efficiency, was inclined rather to discount every feature of his master's generous behaviour, except the covert tribute which he believed it was intended to make to his invaluable services. He knew the business man's instinctive reluctance to reveal his full appreciation of a subordinate's worth, and felt he must allow for this. But, on the other hand, in view of Sir Joseph's intimate relations with the Delarayne household, he was unable altogether to dispel a certain lurking anxiety concerning the baronet's very precise allusions to the question of marriage, which it was hard to believe could have been altogether gratuitous. This thought was disquieting. Denis Malster, without being exactly an incurable philanderer, was nevertheless insufficiently commonplace to contemplate marriage, in the Pauline sense, as a necessity. He was much more disposed, at least for the present, to regard it merely as a piquant possibility, towards which his very attitude of indecision lent him an extra weapon of power in his relations with the other sex. His life, hitherto, had been enjoyable, he thought, simply because it had been an uninterrupted preparation for marriage without the dull certainty of a definite conclusion. To excite interest in the other sex and envy in his own had, ever since he had been a boy of eighteen, constituted the breath of his nostrils, the one spring from which he drew his love of life and his desire to live. Immaculate in his dress, adequately cultivated and intellectual in his speech, and carefully punctilious in the adoption of such amateur pursuits as would be likely to give him the stamp of artistic connoisseurship, he had until now employed his ample income principally in furnishing his extensive wardrobe, in collecting old books and prints, and in giving his chambers that appearance of _outre_ refinement, which was calculated to force his friends to certain inevitable conclusions concerning both his means and the extent of his aesthetic development. In the circumstances, therefore, it was difficult for him to regard the addition to his income, which Sir Joseph had suddenly thought fit to make, as anything more than a fresh means of indulging his various whims to an even greater degree than he had indulged them heretofore,--those whims which had by now become almost driving passions to the exclusion of all else;--and he was certainly not in the least disposed to take Sir Joseph at his word, and to embark upon that undertaking which he knew would put an abrupt end to all the careless dalliance in which his clothes, his fastidious speech, and his parade of artistic discrimination played so effective a part.