Jeffray sat down on a seat in the public walk and watched the people go to and fro. A strutting, waddling crowd it was, picturesque at a distance, with its brocades and colors, but, like a bold and splashing picture, disclosing its artifices and its flaws to the close observer. The men, with a few signal exceptions, appeared to belong to that indefinable order of beings who combined the semi-sentimental spirit of libertinism with the coarse arrogance of an aristrocratic animal. What thrusting out of elbows was there; what delicate dabbings of the nose with lace; what strutting and smirking; what showing off of legs and gesturings with white ruffled hands! It was a clever crowd, too, with the exception of a few clumsy squires who lumbered through it, and the open-mouthed toadies gaping and ready like stupid codfish for “my lord’s joke.” Shallow and superficial seemed the gay, epigrammatic philosophy of such people. Jeffray felt that fashion was justified of her children, and that even the pageantry of life could not make such mumming bearable.
At three o’clock Jeffray dined at a quiet “ordinary” preparatory to paying a state call on the Lady Letitia. He took his meal in a little white-fronted inn whose casements opened on trim lawns, fruit-trees, and white palings. The beds cut in the grass were bright with pansies, stocks, and arabis. A broad brick path led up to the trellised porch.
Even in this quaint, black-beamed old place the same feeling of artificiality haunted him. The bobbing, scurrying waiter was a servile offence against liberty, while at a table in one corner three young exquisites were discussing the virtues of a new shoe-buckle and the piquances of the latest demi-mondaine of the place. The proprietor of the inn, a fat, tallow-faced foreigner in black, scuttled hither and thither, and beamed with delight when Jeffray spoke to him in Italian. Richard felt that the fellow would have licked the dust off any great, little gentleman’s shoes had his highness honored him with such an order. Money, impudence, and ostentation were the only noble necessities amid such surroundings. Beggared, sea-stained Ulysses would have had the dogs set on him in such a pace.