Was it worth living, that monotonous business life of his?
Would not the time soon come in which its dreariness would oppress him as the dulness of Lidford House had oppressed him to-night?
His youth was fast going--nay, had it not indeed gone from him for ever?
had not youth left him all at once when he began his commercial career ?--and the pleasures that had been fresh enough within the last few years were rapidly growing stale.

He knew the German spas, the pine-groves where the hand played, the gambling-saloons and their company, by heart, though he had never stayed more than a fortnight at any one of them.

He had exhausted Brittany and the South of France in these rapid scampers; skimmed the cream of their novelty, at any rate.

He did not care very much for field-sports, and hunted and shot in a jog-trot safe kind of way, with a view to the benefit of his health, which savoured of old bachelorhood.

And as for the rest of his pleasures--the social rubber at his club, the Blackwall or Richmond dinners--it seemed only custom that made them agreeable.
"If I had gone to the Bar, as I intended to do before my father's death, I should have had an object in life," he thought, as he puffed slowly at his cigar; "but a commercial man has nothing to hope for in the way of fame--nothing to work for except money.