Nor
did Captain Paget wish that it should be otherwise. In his ideal
republic, unselfishness and earnestness would have rendered a man rather
a nuisance than otherwise. With the vices of his fellow-men the
diplomatic Horatio was fully competent to deal; but some of his most
subtle combinations on the chess-board of life would have been checkmated
by an unexpected encounter with intractable virtue.
The necessity of living was the paramount consideration to which this
gentleman had given his mind from the time when he found himself a
popular subaltern in a crack regiment, admired for his easy manners and
good looks, respected by meaner men for his good blood, and rich in
everything except that vulgar dross without which the life of West-end
London is so hollow a delusion, so bitter a comedy of mean shifts and
lying devices.
That freebooter of civilization, the man who lives by his wits, is
subject to strange fluctuations from prosperity to adversity. He is the
miner or gold-digger of civilized life; and as there are times when his
pickaxe strikes suddenly on a rich lode, so there are dreary intervals in
which his spade turns up nothing but valueless clay, and the end of each
day's work leaves him with no better evidence of his wasted labour than
the aching limbs which he drags at nightfall to his dismal shanty.
For some months Captain Paget had found Philip Sheldon a very useful
acquaintance.
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