("Spennie" to his relatives and intimates), a light-haired young
gentleman of twenty-four, but in reality the possession of his uncle
and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Julia Blunt.

Lord Dreever's position was one of some embarrassment. At no point
in their history had the Dreevers been what one might call a
parsimonious family. If a chance presented itself of losing money in
a particularly wild and futile manner, the Dreever of the period had
invariably sprung at it with the vim of an energetic blood-hound.
The South Sea Bubble absorbed two hundred thousand pounds of good
Dreever money, and the remainder of the family fortune was
squandered to the ultimate penny by the sportive gentleman who held
the title in the days of the Regency, when Watier's and the Cocoa
Tree were in their prime, and fortunes had a habit of disappearing
in a single evening. When Spennie became Earl of Dreever, there was
about one dollar and thirty cents in the family coffers.

This is the point at which Sir Thomas Blunt breaks into Dreever
history. Sir Thomas was a small, pink, fussy, obstinate man with a
genius for trade and the ambition of an Alexander the Great;
probably one of the finest and most complete specimens of the came-
over-Waterloo-Bridge-with-half-a crown-in-my-pocket-and-now-look-at-
me class of millionaires in existence. He had started almost
literally with nothing. By carefully excluding from his mind every
thought except that of making money, he had risen in the world with
a gruesome persistence which nothing could check. At the age of
fifty-one, he was chairman of Blunt's Stores, L't'd, a member of
Parliament (silent as a wax figure, but a great comfort to the party
by virtue of liberal contributions to its funds), and a knight. This
was good, but he aimed still higher; and, meeting Spennie's aunt,