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At the age of seventeen he is withdrawn from school.  His own marked disinclination saves him from a military career, and he is subsequently sent to pass a year or two upon the Continent of Europe, in order that he may first of all pass the examination for the Diplomatic Service, and subsequently foil foreign statesmen with their own weapons, and in their own language.  Returning, he secures his nomination, and faces the Examiners.  Providence, however, reserves him for lower things.  The Examiners triumph, and the career of the Servant of Society begins in earnest.  The position of his parents secures for him an entrance into good houses.  He is a young man of great tact and of small accomplishments.  He can warble a song, aid a great lady to organise a social festivity, lead a cotillon, order a dinner, and help to eat it, act in amateur theatricals, and recommend French novels to inquiring matrons.  His manners are always easy, and his conversation has that spice of freedom which renders it specially acceptable in the boudoirs of the smart.  The experience of a few years makes plain to him that, in social matters, the serious person goes down before the trifler.  He therefore cultivates flippancy as a fine art, and becomes noted for a certain cheap cynicism, which he sprinkles like a quasi-intellectual pepper over the strong meat of risky conversation.  Moreover, he is constantly self-satisfied, and self-possessed.  Yet he manages to avoid giving offence by occasionally assuming a gentle humility of manner, to which he almost succeeds in imparting a natural air, and he studiously refrains from saying or doing anything which, since it may cause other men to provoke him, may possibly result in his being forced to pretend that he himself has been ruffled.  Yet it must be added that he is always thoroughly harmless.  He flutters about innumerable dovecots, without ever fluttering those who dwell in them, and, in course of time, he comes to be known and accepted everywhere as a useful man.  As might be supposed, he is never obtrusively manly.  The rough pursuits of the merely athletic repel him, yet he has the knack of assuming an interest where he feels it not, and is able to prattle quite pleasantly about sports in which he takes little or no active part.  At the same time it must be admitted that he holds a gun fairly straight, and does not disgrace himself when the necessity of slaughtering a friend’s pheasants interrupts for a few hours the rehearsals of private theatricals, in company with the friend’s wife.  Certainly he is not a fool.  He gauges with great accuracy his own capacities, and carefully limits his ambition to those smaller desires which, since they exact no vaulting power, are never likely to bring about a fall on the other side.  The objects of his admiration are mean; and since he meanly admires them, he comes quite naturally under the Thackerayan definition of a Snob.