A man of such undoubted wealth could not be otherwise than a great favourite with the fair, and innumerable were the invitations that poured into his chambers in the Albany—­dinner parties, evening parties, balls, concerts, boxes for the opera; and as each succeeding season drew to a close, invitations to those last efforts of the desperate, boating and whitebait parties.

Corinthian Tom went to them all—­at least, to as many as he could manage—­always dressing in the most exemplary way, as though he had been asked to show his fine clothes instead of to make love to the ladies.  Manifold were the hopes and expectations that he raised.  Puff could not understand that, though it is all very well to be ‘an am_aa_zin’ instance of a pop’lar man’ with the men, that the same sort of thing does not do with the ladies.

We have heard that there were six mammas, bowling about in their barouches, at the close of his second season, innuendoing, nodding, and hinting to their friends, ‘that, &c.,’ when there wasn’t one of their daughters who had penetrated the rhinoceros-like hide of his own conceit.  The consequence was that all these ladies, all their daughters, all the relations and connexions of this life, thought it incumbent upon them to ‘blow’ our friend Puff—­proclaim how infamously he had behaved—­all because he had danced three supper dances with one girl, brought another a fine bouquet from Covent Garden, walked a third away from her party at a picnic at Erith, begged the mamma of a fourth to take her to a Woolwich ball, sent a fifth a ticket for a Toxophilite meeting, and dangled about the carriage of the sixth at a review at the Scrubbs.  Poor Puff never thought of being more than an am_aa_zin’ instance of a pop’lar man!

Not that the ladies’ denunciations did the Corinthian any harm at first—­old ladies know each other better than that; and each new mamma had no doubt but Mrs. Depecarde or Mrs. Mainchance, as the case might be, had been deceiving herself—­’was always doing so, indeed; her ugly girls were not likely to attract any one—­certainly not such an elegant man as Corinthian Tom.’

But as season after season passed away, and the Corinthian still played the old game—­still went the old rounds—­the dinner and ball invitations gradually dwindled away, till he became a mere stop-gap at the one, and a landing-place appendage at the other.

[Illustration:  MR. PUFFINGTON, FROM THE ORIGINAL PICTURE]

CHAPTER XXXII

THE MAN OF P-R-O-R-PERTY

And now behold Mr. Puffington, fat, fair, and rather more than forty—­Puffington, no longer the light limber lad who patronized us in Bond Street, but Puffington a plump, portly sort of personage, filling his smart clothes uncommonly full.  Men no longer hailing him heartily from bay windows, or greeting him cheerily in short but familiar terms, but bowing ceremoniously as they passed with their wives, or perhaps