The job before him, in his attempt to win Lady Ongar, was a peculiar job, and that Archie well knew.  In some inexplicable manner he put himself into the scales and weighed himself, and discovered his own weight with fair accuracy.  And he put her into the scales, and he found that she was much the heavier of the two.  How he did this—­how such men as Archie Clavering do do it—­I cannot say; but they do weigh themselves, and know their own weight, and shove themselves aside as being too light for any real service in the world.  This they do, though they may fluster with their voices, and walk about with their noses in the air, and swing their canes, and try to look as large as they may.  They do not look large, and they know it; and, consequently, they ring the bells, and look after the horses, and shove themselves on one side, so that the heavier weights may come forth and do the work.  Archie Clavering, who had duly weighed himself, could hardly bring himself to believe that Lady Ongar would be fool enough to marry him!  Seven thousand a year, with a park and farm in Surrey, and give it all to him—­him, Archie Clavering, who had, so to say, no weight at all!  Archie Clavering, for one, could not bring himself to believe it.

But yet Hermy, her sister, thought it possible; and though Hermy was, as Archie had found out by his invisible scales, lighter than Julia, still she must know something of her sister’s nature.  And Hugh, who was by no means light—­who was a man of weight, with money and position, and firm ground beneath his feet—­he also thought that it might be so.  “Faint heart never won a fair lady,” said Archie to himself a dozen times, as he walked down to the Rag.  The Rag was his club, and there was a friend there whom he could consult confidentially.  No; faint heart never won a fair lady; but they who repeat to themselves that adage, trying thereby to get courage, always have faint hearts for such work.  Harry Clavering never thought of the proverb when he went a-wooing.

But Captain Boodle of the Rag—­for Captain Boodle always lived at the Rag when he was not at Newmarket, or at other race-courses, or in the neighborhood of Market Harborough—­Captain Boodle knew a thing or two, and Captain Boodle was his fast friend.  He would go to Boodle and arrange the campaign with him.  Boodle had none of that hectoring, domineering way which Hugh never quite threw off in his intercourse with his brother.  And Archie, as he went along, resolved that when Lady Ongar’s money was his, and when he had a countess for his wife, he would give his elder brother a cold shoulder.

Boodle was playing pool at the Rag, and Archie joined him; but pool is a game which hardly admits of confidential intercourse as to proposed wives, and Archie was obliged to remain quiet on that subject all the afternoon.  He cunningly, however, lost a little money to Boodle, for Boodle liked to win, and engaged himself to dine at the same table with his friend.  Their dinner they ate almost in silence—­unless when they abused the cook, or made to each other some pithy suggestion as to the expediency of this or that delicacy—­bearing always steadily in view the cost as well as desirability of the viands.  Boodle had no shame in not having this or that because it was dear.  To dine with the utmost luxury at the smallest expense was a proficiency belonging to him, and of which he was very proud.