allowed to make his own way. No one of those around him knew how
much care he took to dress himself well, or how careful he was
that no one should know it. His very tailor regarded him as
being simply extravagant in the number of his coats and trousers,
and his friends looked upon him as one of those fortunate beings
to whose nature belongs a facility of being well dressed, or
almost an impossibility of being ill dressed. We all know the
man,--a little man generally, who moves seldom and softly,--who
looks always as though he had just been sent home in a bandbox.
Ferdinand Lopez was not a little man, and moved freely enough;
but never, at any moment,--going into the city or coming out of
it, on horseback or on foot, at home over his book or after the
mazes of the dance,--was he dressed otherwise than with perfect
care. Money and time did it, but folk thought that it grew with
him, as did his hair and his nails. And he always rode a horse
which charmed good judges of what a park nag should be;--not a
prancing, restless, giggling, sideway-going, useless garran, but
an animal well made, well bitted, with perfect paces, on whom a
rider if it pleased him could be as quiet as a statue in a
monument. It often did please Ferdinand Lopez to be quiet on
horseback; and yet he did not look like a statue, for it was
acknowledged through all London that he was a good horseman. He
lived luxuriously too,--though whether at his ease or not nobody
knew,--for he kept a brougham of his own, and during the hunting
season, he had two horses down at Leighton. There had once been
a belief abroad that he was ruined, but they who interest
themselves in such matters had found out,--or at any rate
believed that they had found out,--that he paid his tailor
regularly: and now there prevailed an opinion that Ferdinand
Lopez was a monied man.