And first BLENKINSOP knocks at the door of my memory.  I bid him enter, and I see a tall slim youth, not ill-favoured, wearing well-cut clothes, and carrying a most beautiful, gold-topped Malacca cane delicately in his hand.  He is smoking a cigar, and complains to me that his life is a succession of aimless days, and that he cannot find any employment to turn his hand to.  That very night, I remember, he dined with me.  We went to the play together, and afterwards looked in at Lady Alicia PARBOIL’s dance.  Dear Lady Alicia, how plump she was, and how good-natured, and how well she married her fiddle-headed daughters.  Her husband too, that clumsy, heavy-witted oaf, how cunningly and how successfully withal she schemed for his advancement. Quid plura? you knew her well, she was devoted to you.  I only speak of her to remind you that it was in her hospitable rooms that Gervase BLENKINSOP met you—­and his fate.  He had danced for the second time that evening with Elvira parboil, and, having returned that blushing virgin to her accustomed corner, was just about to depart when the ample form of Lady Alicia bore down upon him:  “Oh, Mr. BLENKINSOP,” her Ladyship began, “I really cannot allow you to go before I introduce you to Mr. Wilbraham.  I hear,” she continued, “he has just lost his Private Secretary, and who knows but that—­” Here she paused, and archly tapping her protege’s cheek with her fan, she bore him off to introduce him to the Cabinet Minister.  I watched the ceremony.  Something whispered to me that BLENKINSOP was lost.  Must I go through the whole painful story?  He became Private Secretary to his new Right Honourable friend, and from that moment he was a changed man.  His cheery good-nature vanished.  Instead of it he cultivated an air of pompous importance.  One by one he weeded out his useless friends, and attached to himself dull but potentially useful big wigs who possessed titles and influence.  At one of our last speaking interviews (we only nod distantly now when we meet), he hinted that in the next distribution of honours his name might be expected.  It appeared, but, alas for gratitude, he had to satisfy himself with a paltry K.C.M.G., which his wife (I forgot to say that he married Elvira) despises.  He is now a disappointed man whom his friends, if he had any, would pity.  He is getting on in life; the affectations he so laboriously cultivated no longer amuse.  The witlings of his Clubs remark openly upon his ridiculous desire to pose as an earth-shaking personage, and when he goes home he has to listen to a series of bitter home-truths from the acrid Elvira.  Would it not, I ask, have been better for Sir Gervase BLENKINSOP, K.C.M.G., to have continued his ancient and aimless existence, than to have had a fallacious greatness dangled before his eyes to the end of his disappointed, but aspiring life?

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