of her to remind you that it was in her hospitable rooms that GERVASE
BLENKINSOP met you--and his fate. He had danced for the second time
that evening with ELVIRA PARBOIL, and, having returned that blushing
virgin to her accustomed corner, was just about to depart when the
ample form of Lady ALICIA bore down upon him: "Oh, Mr. BLENKINSOP,"
her Ladyship began, "I really cannot allow you to go before I
introduce you to Mr. WILBRAHAM. I hear," she continued, "he has just
lost his Private Secretary, and who knows but that--" Here she paused,
and archly tapping her _protégé's_ cheek with her fan, she bore him
off to introduce him to the Cabinet Minister. I watched the ceremony.
Something whispered to me that BLENKINSOP was lost. Must I go through
the whole painful story? He became Private Secretary to his new Right
Honourable friend, and from that moment he was a changed man. His
cheery good-nature vanished. Instead of it he cultivated an air of
pompous importance. One by one he weeded out his useless friends, and
attached to himself dull but potentially useful big wigs who possessed
titles and influence. At one of our last speaking interviews (we
only nod distantly now when we meet), he hinted that in the next
distribution of honours his name might be expected. It appeared, but,
alas for gratitude, he had to satisfy himself with a paltry K.C.M.G.,
which his wife (I forgot to say that he married ELVIRA) despises.
He is now a disappointed man whom his friends, if he had any, would
pity. He is getting on in life; the affectations he so laboriously
cultivated no longer amuse. The witlings of his Clubs remark openly
upon his ridiculous desire to pose as an earth-shaking personage, and
when he goes home he has to listen to a series of bitter home-truths
from the acrid ELVIRA. Would it not, I ask, have been better for
Sir GERVASE BLENKINSOP, K.C.M.G., to have continued his ancient and
aimless existence, than to have had a fallacious greatness dangled
before his eyes to the end of his disappointed, but aspiring life?