Ah, the rapture of those first nights, when he revelled amid the tumult of London, pursuing joy with a pocket full of sovereigns!  Theatres, music-halls, restaurants and public-houses—­he had seen so little of these things, that they excited him as they do a lad fresh from the country.  He drew the line nowhere.  Love of a worthy woman tells for chastity even in the young and the sensual; love of a Fanny French merely debauches the mind and inflames the passions.  Secure in his paganism, Horace followed where the lures of London beckoned him; he knew not reproach of conscience; shame offered but thin resistance to his boiling blood.  By a miracle he had as yet escaped worse damage to health than a severe cold, caught one night after heroic drinking.  That laid him by the heels for a time, and the cough still clung to him.

In less than two years he would command seven thousand pounds, and a share in the business now conducted by Samuel Barmby.  What need to stint himself whilst he felt able to enjoy life?  If Fanny deceived him, were there not, after all, other and better Fannys to be won by his money?  For it was a result of this girl’s worthlessness that Horace, in most things so ingenuous, had come to regard women with unconscious cynicism.  He did not think he could be loved for his own sake, but he believed that, at any time, the show of love, perhaps its ultimate sincerity, might be won by display of cash.

Midway in the month of May he again caught a severe cold, and was confined to the house for nearly three weeks.  Mrs. Damerel, who nursed him well and tenderly, proposed that he should go down for change of air to Falmouth.  He wrote to Nancy, asking whether she would care to see him.  A prompt reply informed him that his sister was on the point of returning to London, so that he had better choose some nearer seaside resort.

He went to Hastings for a few days, but wearied of the place, and came back to his London excitements.  Nancy, however, had not yet returned; nor did she until the beginning of July.

CHAPTER 4

This winter saw the establishment of the South London Fashionable Dress Supply Association—­the name finally selected by Beatrice French and her advisers.  It was an undertaking shrewdly conceived, skilfully planned, and energetically set going.  Beatrice knew the public to which her advertisements appealed; she understood exactly the baits that would prove irresistible to its folly and greed.  In respect that it was a public of average mortals, it would believe that business might be conducted to the sole advantage of the customer.  In respect that it consisted of women, it would give eager attention to a scheme that permitted each customer to spend her money, and yet to have it.  In respect that it consisted of ignorant and pretentious women, this public could be counted upon to deceive itself in the service of its own vanity, and maintain against all opposition that the garments obtained on this soothing system were supremely good and fashionable.