acquaintances. All that is definitely known is that he now and
then emerged from the struggle to dine at the Ritz or Carlton,
correctly garbed and with a correctly critical appetite. On these
occasions he was usually the guest of Lucas Croyden, an amiable
worldling, who had three thousand a year and a taste for
introducing impossible people to irreproachable cookery. Like
most men who combine three thousand a year with an uncertain
digestion, Lucas was a Socialist, and he argued that you cannot
hope to elevate the masses until you have brought plovers' eggs
into their lives and taught them to appreciate the difference
between coupe Jacques and Macédoine de fruits. His friends
pointed out that it was a doubtful kindness to initiate a boy from
behind a drapery counter into the blessedness of the higher
catering, to which Lucas invariably replied that all kindnesses
were doubtful. Which was perhaps true.

It was after one of his Adrian evenings that Lucas met his aunt,
Mrs. Mebberley, at a fashionable tea shop, where the lamp of
family life is still kept burning and you meet relatives who might
otherwise have slipped your memory.

"Who was that good-looking boy who was dining with you last
night?" she asked. "He looked much too nice to be thrown away
upon you."

Susan Mebberley was a charming woman, but she was also an aunt.

"Who are his people?" she continued, when the protégé's name
(revised version) had been given her.