It was not as though he had emerged from that unseen world of the lower classes, of which the upper ten know nothing, to denounce the follies and fashions of the hour; no, indeed, Eustace Gartney had been born in the purple, inherited plenty of money, been brought up in a conventional manner, and the astonishing ideas he possessed, so destructive to the well-being of Society, were certainly not derived from his parents. Both his father and mother had been of the most orthodox type, and would doubtless have looked upon their son's eccentricities with dismay had they lived, but as they both finished with the things of this life shortly after he was born, they were mercifully spared the misery of reflecting that they had produced such a firebrand. Indeed they might have checked his radical-iconoclastic-pessimistic follies at their birth had they lived, but Fate willed it otherwise, and in addition to robbing Eustace of his parents had given him careless guardians, who rarely troubled their heads about him, so that he grew up without discipline or guidance, and even at the age of thirty-eight years was still under the control of an extremely ill-regulated mind. Tall, heavily-built, loose-limbed, with a massive head, leonine masses of dark hair, roughly-cut features, and keen grey eyes, he gave the casual observer an idea that he possessed a fund of latent strength, both intellectual and physical, but he rarely indulged the former, and never by any chance displayed the latter. Clean-shaven, with a peculiarly sensitive mouth, his smile--when he did smile, which was seldom--was wonderfully fascinating, and completely changed the somewhat sombre character of his face. He usually dressed in a careless, shabby fashion, though particular about the spotlessness of his linen, rolled in his gait as if he had been all his life at sea, looked generally half asleep, and, despite the little trouble he took with his outward appearance, was a very noticeable figure. When he chose, he could talk admirably, played the piano in the most brilliant fashion, wrote charming verses and fantastic essays, and altogether was very much liked in London Society, when he chose to put in an appearance at the few houses whose inmates did not bore him. Without doubt a singularly loveable man; children adored him, animals fawned on him, and friends, ah--that was the rub, seeing that he denied the existence of such things, classing them in the category of rocs, sea-serpents, hippogriffs, and such-like strange beasts. Therefore dismissing the word friends, which only applies to uncreated beings, and substituting the word acquaintances, which is good enough to ticket one's fellow creatures with, the acquaintances of Mr. Gartney liked him--or said they liked him--very much.