Mrs. Roby had a husband, but Mr. Roby had not been asked to dine in the Square on this occasion. Mrs. Roby dined in the Square very often, but Mr. Roby very seldom—not probably above once a year, on some special occasion. He and Mr. Wharton had married sisters, but they were quite unlike in character and had never become friends. Mrs. Wharton had been nearly twenty years younger than her husband; Mrs. Roby had been six or seven years younger than her sister; and Mr. Roby was a year or two younger than his wife. The two men therefore belonged to different periods of life, Mr. Roby at the present time being a florid youth of forty. He had a moderate fortune, inherited from his mother, of which he was sufficiently careful; but he loved races, and read sporting papers; he was addicted to hunting and billiards; he shot pigeons, and—so Mr. Wharton had declared calumniously more than once to an intimate friend—had not an H in his vocabulary. The poor man did drop an aspirate now and again; but he knew his defect and strove hard, and with fair average success, to overcome it. But Mr. Wharton did not love him, and they were not friends. Perhaps neither did Mrs. Roby love him very ardently. She was at any rate almost always willing to leave her own house to come to the Square, and on such occasions Mr. Roby was always willing to dine at the Nimrod, the club which it delighted him to frequent.
Mr. Wharton, on entering his own house, met his son on the staircase. “Do you dine at home today, Everett?”
“Well, sir; no, sir. I don’t think I do. I think I half promised to dine with a fellow at the club.”
“Don’t you think you’d make things meet more easily about the end of the year if you dined oftener here, where you have nothing to pay, and less frequently at the club, where you pay for everything?”
“But what I should save you would lose, sir. That’s the way I look at it.”
“Then I advise you to look at it the other way, and leave me to take care of myself. Come in here, I want to speak to you.” Everett followed his father into a dingy back parlour, which was fitted up with book shelves and was generally called the study, but which was gloomy and comfortless because it was seldom used. “I have had your friend Lopez with me at my chambers today. I don’t like your friend Lopez.”
“I am sorry for that, sir.”
“He is a man as to whom I should wish to have a good deal of evidence before I would trust him to be what he seems to be. I dare say he’s clever.”
“I think he’s more than clever.”
“I dare say;—and well instructed in some respects.”
“I believe him to be a thorough linguist, sir.”
“I dare say. I remember a waiter at an hotel in Holborn who could speak seven languages. It’s an accomplishment very necessary for a Courier or a Queen’s Messenger.”
“You don’t mean to say, sir, that you disregard foreign languages?”
“I have said nothing of the kind. But in my estimation they don’t stand in the place of principles, or a profession, or birth, or country. I fancy there has been some conversation between you about your sister.”
“Certainly there has.”
“A young man should be very chary how he speaks to another man, to a stranger, about his sister. A sister’s name should be too sacred for club talk.”
“Club talk! Good heavens, sir; you don’t think that I have spoken of Emily in that way? There isn’t a man in London has a higher respect for his sister than I have for mine. This man, by no means in a light way but with all seriousness, has told me that he was attached to Emily; and I, believing him to be a gentleman and well to do in the world, have referred him to you. Can that have been wrong?”
“I don’t know how he’s ‘to do,’ as you call it. I haven’t asked, and I don’t mean to ask. But I doubt his being a gentleman. He is not an English gentleman. What was his father?”
“I haven’t the least idea.”
“Or his mother?”
“He has never mentioned her to me.”
“Nor his family; nor anything of their antecedents? He is a man fallen out of the moon. All that is nothing to us as passing acquaintances. Between men such ignorance should I think bar absolute intimacy;—but that may be a matter of taste. But it should be held to be utterly antagonistic to any such alliance as that of marriage. He seems to be a friend of yours. You had better make him understand that it is quite out of the question. I have told him so, and you had better repeat it.” So saying, Mr. Wharton went upstairs to dress, and Everett, having received his father’s instructions, went away to the club.
When Mr. Wharton reached the drawing-room, he found Mrs. Roby alone, and he at once resolved to discuss the matter with her before he spoke to his daughter. “Harriet,” he said abruptly, “do you know anything of one Mr. Lopez?”
“Mr. Lopez! Oh yes, I know him.”
“Do you mean that he is an intimate friend?”
“As friends go in London, he is. He comes to our house, and I think that he hunts with Dick.” Dick was Mr. Roby.
“That’s a recommendation.”
“Well, Mr. Wharton, I hardly know what you mean by that,” said Mrs. Roby, smiling. “I don’t think, my husband will do Mr. Lopez any harm; and I am sure Mr. Lopez
