But the man whom they saluted as Vaughan still looked undisturbed.  “Well, I don’t think I ever was quite as much in love with Dizzy as you were; and as to the Premiership, we are not quite at the end yet, and Alors comme alors.”

Philip Vaughan was a man just over fifty:  tall, pale, distinguished-looking, with something in his figure and bearing that reminded one of the statue of Sidney Herbert, which in 1880 still stood before the War Office in Pall Mall.  He looked both delicate and melancholy.  His face was curiously devoid of animation; but his most marked characteristic was an habitual look of meditative abstraction from the things which immediately surrounded him.  As he walked down the steps of the club towards a brougham which was waiting for him, the man who had tried in vain to interest him in the Midlothian Election turned to his nearest neighbour, and said:  “Vaughan is really the most extraordinary fellow I know.  There is nothing on earth that interests him in the faintest degree.  Politics, books, sport, society, foreign affairs—­he I never seems to care a rap about any of them; and yet he knows something about them all, and, if only you can get him to talk, he can talk extremely well.  It is particularly curious about politics, for generally, if a man has once been in political life, he feels the fascination of it to the end.”  “But was Vaughan ever in political life?” “Oh yes I suppose you are too young to remember.  He got into Parliament just after he left Oxford.  He was put in by an old uncle for a Family Borough—­Bilton—­one of those snug little seats, not exactly ’Pocket Boroughs,’ but very like them, which survived until the Reform Act of 1867.”  “How long did he sit?” “Only for one Parliament—­from 1852 to 1857.  No one ever knew why he gave up.  He put it on health, but I believe it was just freakishness.  He always was an odd chap, and of course he grows odder as he grows older.”  But just at that moment another exciting result came, trickling down the tape, and the hubbub was renewed.

Philip Vaughan was, as he put it in his languid way, “rather fond of clubs,” so long as they were not political, and he spent a good deal of his time at the Travellers’, the Athenaeum, and the United Universities, and was a member of some more modern institutions.  He had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends—­at least of his own age.  The Argus-eyed surveyors of club-life noticed that the only people to whom he seemed to talk freely and cheerfully were the youngest members; and he was notoriously good-natured in helping young fellows who wished to join his clubs, and did his utmost to stay the hand of the blackballer.

He had a very numerous cousinship, but did not much cultivate it.  Sometimes, yielding to pressure, he would dine with cousins in London; or pay a flying visit to them in the country; but in order, as it was supposed to avoid these family entanglements, he lived at Wimbledon, where he enjoyed, in a quiet way, his garden and his library, and spent most of the day in solitary rides among the Surrey hills.  When winter set in he generally vanished towards the South of Europe, but by Easter he was back again at Wimbledon, and was to be found pretty often at one or other of his clubs.