If, on the other hand, he sets about the
earning of his living--a drudgery that some of these youths are
compelled to submit to--the classics are only the peas in the shoe
which, as a pilgrim to the far-off shrine of utility, he is compelled
to wear.
Not having to earn his own livelihood, or rather, having already
earned it in the profession of matrimony into which he had entered
in partnership with a wealthy woman, Devenish was a pride to the
college which had turned him out.
He knew most of those people in London who range in the category
of--worth knowing. Anecdotes of them all--those little personal
insights into private domestic relations of which surely there must
somewhere be an illicit still, hidden in the mountains where gossip
echoes--he had at the tips of his fingers.
"Surely you've heard that last thing that Mrs. ---- said at the first
night of ----;" and thereafter follows some quaint conceit--smuggled,
God knows how, from the illicit still in the mountains, stamped with
a fictitious year to give it flavour--which the well-known actress
in question would have offered her soul to have said on the occasion
alluded to in the story, but which she had never even thought of.
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