could stand by the fireplace and pitch the said Samuel Dolly out of the
open window. To know so strong a man, so fine an animal, was something
to boast of. Then, too, if Jasper had a false brilliancy, he had also a
false bonhommie: it was true that he was somewhat imperious, swaggering,
bullying; but he was also off-hand and jocund; and as you knew him, that
sidelong look, that defying gait (look and gait of the man whom the world
cuts), wore away. In fact, he had got into a world which did not cut
him, and his exterior was improved by the atmosphere.

Mr. Losely professed to dislike general society. Drawing rooms were
insipid; clubs full of old fogies. "I am for life, my boys," said Mr.
Losely,

"'Can sorrow from the goblet flow,
Or pain from Beauty's eye?'"

Mr. Losely, therefore, his hat on one side, lounged into the saloons of
theatres, accompanied by a cohort of juvenile admirers, their hats on one
side also, and returned to the pleasantest little suppers in his own
apartment. There "the goblet" flowed; and after the goblet, cigars for
some, and a rubber for all.

So puissant Losely's vitality, and so blest by the stars his luck, that
his form seemed to wax stronger and his purse fuller by this "life." No
wonder he was all for a life of that kind; but the slight beings who
tried to keep up with him grew thinner and thinner, and poorer and
poorer; a few weeks made their cheeks spectral and their pockets a dismal
void. Then as some dropped off from sheer inanition, others whom they
had decoyed by their praises of "Life" and its hero came into the magic
circle to fade and vanish in their turn.