three conditions, he had managed to pretty thoroughly exhaust the
pleasures of the capital. At all events he believed he had exhausted
them, and he wanted a new sensation. He had "done" his London until it
was more flavorless than Paris, and he had dawdled more or less in the
various Courts of Europe. While in St. Petersburg he had inserted
a too curious finger into the Terrorist pie, and had come very
near making a prolonged acquaintance with the House of Preventative
Detention; but after being whisked safely out of the country under
cover of a friend's passport, he had announced himself cured of
further interest in revolutionary politics. The affair had made him
quite famous for a time, however; Krapotkin had sought him out and
warmly thanked him for his interest in the Russian Geysers, and begged
him to induce his father to abjure his peace policy and lend his hand
to the laudable breaking of Czarism's back. But Lord Cardingham, who
was not altogether ruled by his younger son, had declined to expend
his seductions upon Mr. Gladstone in the cause of a possible laying of
too heavy a rod upon England's back, and had recommended his erratic
son to let the barbarism of absolutism alone in the future, and try
his genius upon that of democracy. Dartmouth, accordingly, had spent
a winter in Washington as Secretary of Legation, and had entertained
himself by doling out such allowance of diplomatic love to the fair
American dames as had won him much biographical honor in the press
of the great republic. Upon his father's private admonition, that it
would be as well to generously resign his position in favor of some
more needy applicant, with a less complex heart-line and a slight
acquaintance with international law, he had, after a summer at
Newport, returned to Europe and again devoted himself to winning a
fame not altogether political. And now there was nothing left, and he
felt that fate had used him scurrilously. He was twenty-eight, and had
exhausted life. He had nothing left but to yawn through weary years