of self-assurance and a confident balance, which in itself gives a
grace to a young man.

He was staying at the present time in his uncle's house, during the
delicious warmth of the summer,--for, as yet, the month of July was
not all past; and his intimate friend, Adolphus Crosbie, who was
or was not a mere clerk as my readers may choose to form their own
opinions on that matter, was a guest in the house with him. I am
inclined to say that Adolphus Crosbie was not a mere clerk; and I
do not think that he would have been so called, even by Lily Dale,
had he not given signs to her that he was a "swell." Now a man in
becoming a swell,--a swell of such an order as could possibly be
known to Lily Dale,--must have ceased to be a mere clerk in that very
process. And, moreover, Captain Dale would not have been Damon to any
Pythias of whom it might fairly be said that he was a mere clerk. Nor
could any mere clerk have got himself in either at the Beaufort or at
Sebright's. The evidence against that former assertion made by Lily
Dale is very strong; but then the evidence as to her latter assertion
is as strong, Mr Crosbie certainly was a swell. It is true that he
was a clerk in the General Committee Office. But then, in the first
place, the General Committee Office is situated in Whitehall; whereas
poor John Eames was forced to travel daily from his lodgings in
Burton Crescent, ever so far beyond Russell Square, to his dingy room
in Somerset House. And Adolphus Crosbie, when very young, had been
a private secretary, and had afterwards mounted up in his office to
some quasi authority and senior-clerkship, bringing him in seven
hundred a year, and giving him a status among assistant secretaries
and the like, which even in an official point of view was something.
But the triumphs of Adolphus Crosbie had been other than these. Not
because he had been intimate with assistant secretaries, and was