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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
First published in 1875, The Way We Live Now is Trollope's fiercest social satire, a panoramic study of London gripped by speculation. Around the magnet of Augustus Melmotte—a charismatic, opaque financier touting a dubious Mexican railway—Trollope interlaces Lady Carbury's puffery, Sir Felix's predatory courtship, Paul Montague's tie to the American widow Mrs Hurtle, and the venality of Parliament and the press. With omniscient poise and mordant irony, the novel weds capacious realism to serialized suspense, exposing the marriage market, credit culture, and modern publicity. Anthony Trollope, a veteran Post Office civil servant and one of Victorian England's most disciplined craftsmen, wrote the book amid political disillusion and financial scandal. His failed 1868 parliamentary bid, close knowledge of journalism's economies, and travels in America sharpened his skepticism about respectability. In An Autobiography he declared his aim to expose pervasive dishonesty; this novel is the result. This World's Classics edition suits readers seeking narrative pleasure and historical clarity: its introduction and notes frame Trollope's targets while letting the comedy breathe. Recommended to students of finance, media, and ethics—and to any reader who suspects that modern life, with its bubbles and spin, began earlier than we think. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The Way We Live Now (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope charts how the lust for credit, celebrity, and social ascent presses against the claims of conscience, affection, and truth, testing the glue of families and the honor of professions, as London’s drawing rooms, clubs, and newspapers begin to orbit a dazzling new source of wealth and influence, and shows how swiftly a culture that mistakes confidence for substance trains itself to applaud what it does not understand, excuse what it cannot justify, and wager its future on reputations that flourish in the light of admiration but evaporate under scrutiny.
First published in 1875, the novel belongs to the great tradition of Victorian social satire and panoramic realism. Trollope situates his action largely in London, moving among Mayfair parlors, City offices, newspaper rooms, and the chambers of Parliament, with brief excursions that widen the frame of national life. The book emerges from a decade marked by expanding markets and public fascination with finance, and it treats those preoccupations with an unsparing yet humane curiosity. Its scale allows a broad cross-section of classes and professions to appear, but the focus remains distinctly urban, where influence circulates as quickly as rumor.
At the center stands Augustus Melmotte, a magnetic financier whose sudden prominence unsettles hierarchies and invites the titled and the struggling alike to stake hopes on his favor. Around him cluster a journalist seeking relevance, a mother advancing her family’s prospects, a young man torn between love and principle, and members of the political class gauging advantage. The immediate fascination is not simply whether a scheme will prosper, but how reputations are made, traded, and defended in public. Trollope sets these converging ambitions into motion early, and the novel builds by incremental revelations rather than abrupt shocks, inviting the reader into complicities.
Stylistically, the book deploys an omniscient voice that glides from clubland banter to domestic anxiety, seasoning the narrative with dry irony and measured moral commentary. Trollope’s sentences are supple and lucid, his chapters brisk yet accumulative, each return to a storyline slightly adjusting the balance of sympathy. Dialogue carries much of the energy, but the narrator’s aside-like clarities guide attention without coercion. The mood oscillates between comic exposure and sober appraisal, and even the most venal figures are granted enough interior texture to resist caricature. The result is a broad, bustling canvas that remains consistently readable, patient, and exact.
Among the themes that accumulate are the seductions of the credit economy, the porous boundary between entrepreneurial daring and fraud, and the performance of status through houses, dinners, and alliances. The press emerges as both watchdog and participant, shaping reputations it pretends merely to report. Political life appears susceptible to the same currencies—attention, access, and debt—that animate commerce, while the marriage market becomes an index of social liquidity. Trollope is alert to the pressures of mobility and the precariousness of honor in a world of negotiable values, yet he keeps questions of loyalty, duty, and simple kindness steadily in view.
For contemporary readers, the novel speaks urgently to cycles of speculation, the spectacle of celebrity wealth, and the murky traffic between media, politics, and finance. Its portrayal of collective credulity feels familiar in an age when confidence can be engineered and attention monetized. The book also invites reflection on professional ethics, corporate governance, and the social costs of reputational panic. Readers will notice attitudes that reflect the prejudices of its time; acknowledging those elements allows a more exact grasp of how suspicion of outsiders and fascination with riches can entwine. Trollope’s acuity lies in systems, not just villains.
This World’s Classics edition presents a generous, panoramic novel best approached with patience and curiosity, letting its many strands work together across a steady rhythm of scenes and social calls. The setup is clear from the start—an arrival, a scheme, a scramble for advantage—yet the interest rests in gradual shifts of allegiance, motive, and self-deception. Readers new to Trollope will find wit without cruelty and moral seriousness without dogma. One may track how invitations, ledgers, and newspaper paragraphs perform similar work, recording who counts. By the end, the questions it raises about value feel both historical and freshly personal.
Synopsis
Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, first serialized in 1874–1875, presents a sweeping satire of late Victorian London, where social ambition, credit, and appearances overshadow principle. The narrative gathers a broad cast around a sudden financial sensation: the arrival of Augustus Melmotte, a powerful, opaque financier whose wealth dazzles society. Trollope juxtaposes City speculators, titled but indebted families, striving writers, and romantically entangled cousins, tracing how each responds to new opportunities for profit or status. At its core, the novel investigates the price of reputation in a culture intoxicated by success, asking what honor can mean amid fashionable dinners, rising shares, and public praise.
The story opens on the Carbury family’s precarious position. Lady Carbury, a tireless self-promoter, publishes a book and cultivates London editors to secure favorable notice, exposing the give-and-take of literary journalism. Her son, Sir Felix, a charming but feckless gambler, burns through money at his club and searches for an advantageous marriage. Her daughter, Hetta, is reserved and principled, admired by their cousin, Roger Carbury, a landowner who represents old-country steadiness. Through this household, Trollope introduces the novel’s moral spectrum, contrasting calculated self-advancement, idle dissipation, and steady duty as characters converge on London’s fashionable drawing rooms and newsprint columns.
Paul Montague, Roger’s protégé, returns to England with a complicated past. He is drawn to Hetta, but his earlier connection to an American widow, Mrs Hurtle, follows him across the Atlantic and demands resolution. Paul is also entangled in a transatlantic railway venture championed by Hamilton K. Fisker, whose energy and optimism symbolize the era’s speculative drive. The pull between personal loyalty and commercial opportunity binds Paul ever closer to Melmotte’s orbit, where directorships, subscriptions, and endorsements can elevate a name overnight. Roger’s quiet disapproval of speculative finance and his own feelings for Hetta deepen the novel’s interlaced personal and ethical conflicts.
Augustus Melmotte emerges as the central force. Mysterious in origin but undeniable in effect, he sets up a grand company to build a Mexican railway, installs fashionable directors, and orchestrates subscriptions that electrify investors. Society, eager for novelty and profit, courts him, while he courts society with houses, horses, and entertainments. His daughter, Marie, becomes an asset in negotiations, drawing suitors whose attentions blend affection, strategy, and debt relief. Lord Nidderdale is steered by his family toward the match; Sir Felix Carbury, under pressure and short of funds, sees the courtship as an escape from ruin. Marie’s own will complicates every arrangement.
Around this speculative nucleus revolve older families who need ready cash. The Longestaffes consider selling property to restore their finances, discovering that the path from land to liquidity runs through Melmotte’s counting-house. Adolphus “Dolly” Longestaffe resists being maneuvered into transactions he does not control, and his obstinacy invites legal scrutiny and professional meddling by the sharp solicitor Mr Squercum. Georgiana Longestaffe, desperate for a husband, confronts the narrowing prospects of an impoverished gentlewoman and the costs of family pride. Trollope shows how aristocratic names, once self-sufficient, now depend on financiers, lawyers, and paper instruments to make ends meet.
Beyond drawing rooms and board tables, Trollope threads a rural-urban strand through Ruby Ruggles and John Crumb. Ruby, promised to the steadfast Crumb, is dazzled by London and flattered by Sir Felix’s attentions, prompting a flight that exposes her to the city’s hazards. Roger Carbury, though no relation, intervenes as a moral guardian, emphasizing duty and protection over glamour. In parallel, the novel’s newsroom scenes reveal an economy of influence: Mr Broune and Mr Alf weigh copy, cultivate sources, and arbitrate reputations, while Lady Carbury learns how easily puffery can slide into compromise. Fame, Trollope suggests, is as credit-based as finance.
Melmotte’s social apotheosis arrives with sumptuous public festivities and an ever-expanding circle of grandees. Dinners, speeches, and pageantry affirm his indispensability to national prosperity and cement his transformation from outsider to kingmaker. The Mexican railway’s share price soars on expectancy and endorsement, and Melmotte’s name reaches the hustings as he enters parliamentary politics, seeking the ultimate seal of legitimacy. Yet the same scale that magnifies his triumph amplifies doubts. Whispers about documents, signatures, and collateral begin to circulate; bankers and solicitors ask precise questions that lavish banquets cannot answer. Public acclaim and private arithmetic move on divergent tracks.
The romantic knots tighten as financial pressures mount. Paul’s position with Hetta is strained by Mrs Hurtle’s claims and by Roger’s stern warnings. Sir Felix, ever in need of funds, schemes toward an elopement with Marie, while families and guardians counter-scheme to secure settlements and preserve appearances. Georgiana Longestaffe contemplates a match with the capable banker Mr Breghert, a prospect that provokes frank discussions of religion, prejudice, and money. In boardrooms, directors discover that enthusiasm cannot substitute for accounts, and property conveyances tied to Melmotte’s dealings bring the Longestaffes and their advisers into contentious legal territory.
As investigations proliferate and alliances shift, characters face the consequences of choices made under the sway of credit, vanity, and fear of exclusion. Trollope brings his many threads to testing points without grand melodrama, allowing social attitudes, institutional procedures, and personal scruples to drive events. The novel’s broader message endures: speculative manias distort judgment, fashionable opinion often mistakes noise for value, and the hunger for recognition tempts even the decent to equivocate. Yet Trollope also preserves space for steadiness, kindness, and reform. The Way We Live Now remains a lucid mirror of modernity’s temptations and a sober inquiry into how reputations are built and undone.
Historical Context
Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now appeared serially in the illustrated weekly the Graphic between 1874 and 1875 and was issued in two volumes in 1875. It is set largely in early-1870s London, amid the City’s counting houses, the Stock Exchange, Parliament, and fashionable West End drawing rooms and clubs. Britain was the hub of global finance, its credit and communications networks binding together imperial and foreign markets. Urban growth, dense railway links, and rapid news circulation compressed distance and time. Against this background, Trollope constructs a panoramic social satire that probes how money, status, and institutions shape conduct in high Victorian society.
Financial speculation had surged after legal and institutional changes. The Companies Act 1862 consolidated incorporation and limited liability, and the 1867 Act eased the promotion and transfer of shares. London’s money market, centered on the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange, expanded credit to new joint-stock ventures. The spectacular collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co. in 1866 sparked a citywide panic, sharpening anxieties about promoters and paper wealth; Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street (1873) codified lender-of-last-resort doctrine. Trollope draws on this environment of promoted companies, prospectuses, and insider rumor to scrutinize credulity and fraud, exposing the brittle ethics of mid-Victorian capitalism.
Politics was also in flux. The Second Reform Act of 1867 enlarged the urban male electorate, and the Ballot Act of 1872 introduced secret voting, curbing but not eradicating bribery and patronage. Trollope had personally stood as a Liberal candidate for Beverley in 1868; the election was voided for corruption, and the borough was disfranchised by Parliament in 1870. Shifting party tactics under leaders such as Gladstone and Disraeli intensified competition for influence and access. The novel’s scenes of canvassing, committee rooms, and tactical alliances reflect these transformations, criticizing the transactional habits that persisted despite reforms intended to purify public life.
An expanding press shaped opinion and markets. The mid-Victorian decades saw rising circulation for daily newspapers and weeklies, with influential titles such as the Times and the Pall Mall Gazette (founded 1865). The Graphic, founded in 1869, paired reportage with powerful illustrations. Sensational trials like the Tichborne case (1871–1874) fueled debate about credibility, class, and evidence. Financial columns, city gossip, and advertising swayed investors, while strict but uneven libel laws constrained reportage. Trollope situates characters amid editors, critics, and rumor, showing how publicity confers legitimacy or ruins it, and criticizing a media culture that amplifies speculation and social notoriety.
The old hierarchy of land and title faced pressure from commercial fortunes. Many aristocratic estates were encumbered by debt and entails, while City magnates accumulated liquid wealth. Marriage settlements brokered alliances between rank and money, a pattern visible in transatlantic society as well—Jennie Jerome’s 1874 marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill exemplified new Anglo-American ties. London also hosted an influx of continental financiers and entrepreneurs, provoking admiration and xenophobic suspicion. Trollope sets the tensions of pedigree against cash, recording the ease with which deference follows spectacle and credit, and criticizing a culture that prizes appearances while overlooking the sources and solidity of wealth.
Victorian marriage law and custom shaped women’s choices. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 created a civil divorce court, and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870 allowed wives to own earnings and some property acquired after marriage, though full equal property rights came later. Courtship unfolded under chaperonage, during the London Season, with dowries and settlements determining prospects. Respectable paid work for genteel women was limited, often to governess or companion roles. Trollope portrays fortunes, allowances, and marriage negotiations with precision, indicting the economic calculations that constrain intimacy and the social penalties that fall hardest on women with few independent resources.
Technological integration accelerated speculation. The successful 1866 transatlantic telegraph and a dense domestic wire network gave London traders near-instant information. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shortened routes to India and East Asia, symbolizing Britain’s global reach. British investors lent heavily to foreign states and railways in the 1860s and early 1870s, including ventures in Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States, before the 1873 financial crisis chilled credit. Trollope’s focus on a grand foreign railway scheme mirrors this appetite for distant projects, critiquing the credulous cosmopolitanism and moral evasions that could accompany globally dispersed capital.
Gentlemen’s clubs, private dining rooms, and gaming tables anchored elite sociability in the West End. Institutions such as Brooks’s or the Reform Club modeled the exclusive milieu Trollope evokes, while the Gaming Act 1845 rendered wagering contracts unenforceable in court even as gambling debts remained socially binding. Etiquette, dinners, and charitable subscriptions operated as currencies of reputation alongside cash and credit. Trollope threads these spaces together with the City and Westminster, depicting networks that reward audacity and display over probity. The resulting panorama is a critique of a culture in which institutional respectability masks, and sometimes abets, speculative excess.
Author Biography
Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was a central figure of Victorian fiction, renowned for his expansive portrayal of English social life and institutions. Over a long career he produced more than forty novels, numerous stories, travel books, and essays, combining realism, humor, and moral inquiry. His two great sequences—the Barsetshire novels and the Palliser (or Parliamentary) series—offered panoramic studies of clergy, gentry, and politics that helped define the nineteenth-century English novel. Trollope also spent decades as a civil servant in the General Post Office, a parallel vocation that sharpened his understanding of bureaucracy and public service, themes that recur throughout his fiction with distinctive clarity and balance.
Born in London and educated at Harrow School and Winchester College, Trollope experienced an unsettled and financially strained youth that shaped his later sympathies for social aspiration and respectability. His mother, the writer Frances Trollope, demonstrated the possibilities of professional authorship and helped orient him toward the literary world. Trollope read widely and admired traditions of English realism associated with Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray, while also absorbing the narrative breadth of Walter Scott. These influences encouraged his commitment to plausibility in character and motive, a preference for everyday moral testing over melodrama, and a steady interest in institutions as living social organisms.
In the 1830s Trollope entered the General Post Office, where early frustrations as a junior clerk gave way to advancement after he was posted to Ireland in the early 1840s. Long rides on official business and exposure to rural communities fed his first attempts at fiction. His debut, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, appeared in the late 1840s, followed by The Kellys and the O’Kellys. During his postal career he helped recommend and implement roadside letter boxes during inspections in the Channel Islands, a model soon adopted more widely. The discipline demanded by civil service work would become a hallmark of his writing life.
Trollope’s breakthrough came with The Warden (1855), which introduced the cathedral town of Barchester and the ethical strains within ecclesiastical patronage. Barchester Towers (1857) consolidated his reputation, expanding the cast and sharpening the comic and satirical register. The ensuing Barsetshire sequence—among them Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset—blends clerical politics with courtship, money, and professional duty. Reviewers praised Trollope’s unforced realism and fluent storytelling, while some expressed reservations about his candid treatment of institutional self-interest. The novels’ rounded characterizations and recurring setting gave Victorian readers a richly coherent social world.
While the Barsetshire books secured his standing, Trollope extended his range with the Palliser novels—Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke’s Children—probing parliamentary life, party maneuvering, and the pressures of wealth and marriage. Alongside these cycles he published major stand-alone works, including Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Way We Live Now, each notable for legal, psychological, or financial themes rendered with probing realism. He also produced travel writing based on official tours and later journeys, using an observant, practical style that echoes the social attentiveness of his fiction.
Trollope became famous for a methodical routine: rising early, planning carefully, and producing steady pages before office hours, habits he continued after leaving the Post Office in the late 1860s to write full-time. His public profile broadened when, in 1868, he stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Parliament, an experience that enriched the political texture of his fiction. After his death, An Autobiography (published 1883) surprised readers with its candor about professional practices and payment, prompting debate about artistry and commerce. Over time, criticism increasingly emphasized his psychological subtlety, social range, and particularly his complex portraits of women.
In his later years Trollope sustained a high rate of publication and undertook long travels that yielded substantial books of reportage and observation. He died in 1882, leaving a body of work that has remained continuously in print. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers have rediscovered his breadth, moral evenhandedness, and vivid institutional settings, aided by notable radio and television adaptations that brought Barsetshire and the Pallisers to new audiences. Today he is widely valued as a principal architect of the English realist tradition, his studies of power, duty, and personal choice continuing to illuminate public life and private conscience.
The Way We Live Now (Summarized Edition)
Chapter I Three Editors
In her Welbeck Street study Lady Carbury races over paper, a devotee of Literature. She fires a note to Nicholas Broune of the Morning Table: “I’ll send early sheets of my two volumes; do give a poor struggler a lift.” She parades her Criminal Queens—Semiramis twisted to guilt, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Julia, Gibbon’s ladies, Henry VIII with sinful Howard, devilish Catherine de’ Medici, Mary Stuart “Guilty! guilty always!”, pardoned Marie Antoinette, unwhitewashed Caroline. “Do it yourself, like a dear man… Yours gratefully and faithfully, Matilda Carbury.” She sighs that few women escape men’s playthings, yet, as girls read everything, why shouldn’t an old woman write anything
Still blooming at forty-three, she treats beauty as capital: smile, whisper, glance, all used to win reviews and cheques. Of her allies she trusts Broune most; he likes handsome women. Recently, while she bargained for rate No. 1, her soft hand lingered in his and enthusiasm slid his arm round her waist for a kiss. Unruffled, she stepped back: “Mr Broune, how foolish! Think of my son, my daughter, my name. Say you are sorry, and it shall be forgotten.” He murmured, “For worlds I would not offend you.” A look secured pay; she deemed the incident success, while he departed muttering at his confusion.
Two further missives wait. The second, headed for Mr Booker of the Literary Chronicle, must woo a critic of different stripe. Booker, sixty, bald, energetic, carries a houseful of daughters and a widowed child with two little ones. Five hundred a year from the Chronicle, plus magazine pieces and an annual book, keep him barely afloat. Years of commercial compromise have dulled his literary scruple, yet spirits stay high and the paper prospers under his hand. Dependent mouths and encroaching rivals leave scant room for independence, so a favour asked cleverly by a still-beautiful woman may well be granted. Letter No. 2 begins.
Welbeck Street, 25 February 187—. “DEAR MR BOOKER, Mr Leadham will send you an advance copy of my ‘Criminal Queens.’ I am already at work on your ‘New Tale of a Tub’ for the ‘Breakfast Table,’ and I mean to be thorough. Should you desire any particular emphasis on your view of current Protestantism, inform me. Please write a word confirming the accuracy of my historical details; you can do so safely. Pray be prompt, for early notice governs the sale, and my royalty begins only after the first four hundred. Yours sincerely, MATILDA CARBURY.” Addressed to ALFRED BOOKER, Strand.
Booker chuckled at the notion of Lady Carbury treating his Protestant polemic and at the blunders she must have made about queens she scarcely knew, yet he felt the lure of a laudatory column in the ‘Breakfast Table.’ He resolved to repay her, not by calling the history accurate, but by saying the portraits were delightful, feminine, and sure to grace every drawing-room. He could review it without cutting the pages, preserving resale value. “Bad; of course it is bad,” he told a younger colleague. “If we tried to mend everything at once we’d do nothing. I’m not strong enough, and neither are you.
The third missive was addressed to Ferdinand Alf, controller of the ‘Evening Pulpit,’ a paper that had turned into ‘quite a property.’ It claimed daily to record everything done before two o’clock and to foretell the next twelve hours, displaying confident omniscience mixed with glaring ignorance, yet always written cleverly. The sheet professed no obedience to any master—“Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri[1]”—and therefore enjoyed perpetual licence to scold whichever party acted. Praise, Alf understood, is dull; attack delights. Because he praised nobody, his lash offended no one for long, much as a caricaturist is tolerated for perpetual distortion.
Alf himself was a spare, well-cut man of about forty, hair discreetly darkened against grey, mouth forever smiling, eyes pitilessly keen. Rumoured to be a German Jew, he nevertheless knew England as only an insider can. Rejected by several clubs, he forced entrance into others and then spoke of the excluded institutions as senile and moribund. He dined the great in a small house near Berkeley Square, kept hunters in Northamptonshire, earned roughly six thousand a year from the ‘Pulpit,’ and spent half. Declaring that ignorance of Alf meant darkness, he had become an acknowledged figure in politics, letters, and fashion.
“DEAR MR ALF, who wrote that flaying of Fitzgerald Barker’s poem? Nothing so deft has appeared; the poor wretch may not lift his head till autumn. Puffing put him on every table, though nobody reads him. Could I learn that trade, I might better feed my children, yet I still trust to honest work. When the ‘Pulpit’ reviews my ‘Criminal Queens,’ I expect my errors to be scourged, but hope the portraits will be called vivid, not sent back to the stockings basket. I have friends every Tuesday; please come. Ever yours, MATILDA CARBURY.” She sealed, sighed, shut her eyes, then snatched the pen again.
Chapter II The Carbury Family
Lady Carbury’s own letters trumpet her ruined name and lofty purpose, but their fawning falsehoods cannot hide the harder truth. She has been maligned, yet she really does toil for her son and daughter, and would shred her fingers to secure their welfare. Widow of Sir Patrick Carbury, once a fiery Indian hero turned baronet, she had surrendered girlish dreams at eighteen for a red-faced autocrat of forty-four. Faithful, self-controlled, she smiled minutes after blows, smothered every bruise, strove against his growing drink, and wrapped each deceitful manoeuvre round a single resolve: protect the household and remain outwardly irreproachable.
For fifteen storm-crossed years she managed him, bore a son and daughter, hid his rages, and fought the bottle that thickened his hand. At last, needing friendship, she allowed harmless intimacy with another man; Sir Patrick’s sudden jealousy hurled insults and violence too brutal to endure, so she escaped, yet plotted every step so that innocence could be proved. Tongues raved for months; eventually truth choked the scandal and she returned to nurse the shattered warrior till he died in England. Released at forty, scorning both romance and drab widowhood, she vowed to seek allies, a livelihood, and a London footing.
The baronet left a bare thousand a year each to Felix and to his wife, hers passing to both children after death; thus the son, free of household charges and often quartered with his mother, possessed the same income that must house and feed two women. Felix, already in the Guards[2], devoured it recklessly, sold out, piled debts no ledger could measure, and at twenty-five lounged ruined on her purse. Still she idolised him, tightened her own belt, pushed articles and books on the market, and trusted prudent Henrietta to endure. The girl, tutored to excuse every masculine vice, accepted the sacrifice without complaint.
The mother's devotion lacked nobility. Felix had been her shining star, pampered from cradle upward. Even while he raced toward ruin she scarcely whispered restraint, and indulgence grew with his years. She felt an almost boastful thrill in every lavish prank, so long as her darling glittered. He lounged before her unabashed, selfish wrongs unacknowledged, sure no censure would follow. Thus she fashioned a man who neither blushed nor pitied, whose comfort eclipsed all claims. Habit governed both: she, willing slave; he, pampered tyrant, coolly exacting, calmly ungrateful. Their household revolved around his pleasure, the fissure widening each careless day.
His extravagance forced Lady Carbury to turn that genteel flirtation with letters into a bread-winning trade. Hearing of editors' cheques and fashionable women's earnings, she dreamed of an extra thousand a year—enough to let Felix look like a gentleman again and snare the heiress she pictured smoothing every debt. She worked fast, could spin sprightly commonplace across endless pages, but her goal was praise, not quality. If Mr. Broune privately called the book trash yet promised a rapturous notice in the Breakfast Table, her vanity would remain unbruised. False from crown to sole, she still held a spark of genuine kindness.
Sir Felix, product of that spoiling, felt nothing beyond the moment's comfort. Future loss, whether a month or a night away, never stirred his imagination. Praise, petting, good dinners, and caresses won his allegiance, yet he loved nobody enough to forgo a single pleasure. His heart was stone, but his face a masterpiece. Dark olive skin, short silky black hair, long brown eyes set beneath flawless arches, and a perfectly modelled nose and mouth, finished by a faultless moustache and shapely chin, formed a beauty men acknowledged and women proclaimed unequalled. Simplicity of dress disguised the vanity of this graceful egotist.
His assurance carried him through clubs and boudoirs until a quarrel with a brother officer revealed his cowardice: after loud threats he showed the white feather. A year later the stain lingered, yet the plan remained—he must marry money. Beauty, breeding, lively talk, audacity he had, but his hollow declarations ruined him. The girl with forty thousand knew it. "How can I show I care more than by wishing to make you my wife?" he asked. "I don't know that you can, but you don't care," she replied. Now, steered by his mother, he pursued a far richer heiress, daughter of a bottomless Croesus.
Meanwhile Henrietta Carbury, scarcely twenty-one, lived quietly in Welbeck Street. Like her brother she was lovely, though paler and less exact in feature; unlike him her face glowed with self-forgetting sweetness. Neglected by a mother consumed with Felix and economy, she had escaped early spoiling, rarely attended balls, and wore modest gloves and gowns. When London glimpsed her it murmured that she was charming, and London was right. Romance, however, had already entered: Roger Carbury of Carbury Hall, nearly forty, adored his cousin passionately. Yet Henrietta had also met young Paul Montague, and his presence cast a new, promising light on her future.
Chapter III The Beargarden
Lady Carbury’s modest Welbeck Street drawing-room, doors shut to all but editors and critics, is her workplace when Sir Felix bursts in, cigar alight. “My dear boy, pray leave your tobacco below.” He flips the stub into the grate: “What affectation! Some women praise smoke, others damn it.” Lounging on the sofa, he comes to the point: “Can you let me have twenty pounds?” “My dear Felix!” “A fellow must have something in his pocket; I pay for nothing I can help, even get my hair cut on credit. What is life worth if one can’t seize the day
She pours tea and turns him toward the heiress. “Have you been at the Melmottes’?” “Just left. She’s not pretty, not plain, not clever, not stupid—simply ‘good enough for me’.” “And the mother?” “A caution; nobody knows where she sprang from.” “Does it matter?” “Not at all. The old man’s chasing dukes, so any fellow might win the girl.” “Why not you?” “I’m trying; don’t flog a willing horse.” She sighs: “But we are poor, Felix.” He argues that to hunt fortune he must still look wealthy, horses and all. At last she writes the cheque; he pockets it and escapes.
Cheque secured, Felix strolls to the Beargarden, that thrifty debauch of a club with wines and Herr Vossner’s obliging accounts. On the steps stands Dolly Longestaffe, idly smoking. “Dining here, Dolly?” “Too much trouble to dress elsewhere.” “Hunting tomorrow?” “Mean to, but my man never gets me up—why can’t they start at three?” They curse lazy grooms, count five horses at Leighton, maybe four, maybe ridden by Lord Grasslough. “I never will lend a horse again,” vows Dolly. Felix laughs: “Some fellows have no money.” Then he softens: “Let me ride two of yours for a couple of days—no one else could help me.
“Well, you may have them—for two days. I’m not sure my fellow will believe you; he wouldn’t believe Grasslough, though Grasslough simply took the horses,” Dolly says. “Write him a note,” suggests Sir Felix. “My dear fellow, that’s a bore; he’ll trust you, we’re pals. Now a drop of curaçao before dinner; come and sharpen the appetite.” Nearly seven o’clock. Nine hours later the same pair, with Lord Grasslough and another, rise from cards in an upstairs room of the Beargarden, where no breakfasts appear but suppers flourish till dawn. Gambling has run without pause since ten; devils, broils, and hot toasts have fed them.
