Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/183



But the worst was to come. Bad as it was in a financial and practical sense to be ignored by the Academicians, deserted by the British Public, and forsaken by the picture-dealers, there yet remained to Jack the gorgeous, gilded, glittering Swells, whose invitations last year had been so plentiful that he had occasionally revolted against them, exclaiming, "What nuisances they are, taking one from one's work, and running after a fellow like this!"

(For although smart people sometimes ask the husband without the wife, it would hardly do to ask the wife without the husband: only, Jack had never quite seen it in this light.)

But this year, strange to say, not a single invitation for the Spratts from any house really worth going to, was delivered either by hand or by post; and Mrs. Spratt would read aloud the fashionable arrangements for the week, and the week after, and the week after that; and not a card for any arrangement whatever, even at the eleventh hour! And even as she read, they groaned in the spirit together, and dropt the briny tear.

O ye Spratts! did you think it would go on for ever? Know ye not that all those wallowing sea-monsters of whom you small British fry are so doatingly fond, can be almost as fickle as yourselves—as ready to drop new friends for newer, as you are to drop old friends for them? Alas! pretty faces must not fade, pretty pictures never fail, and money be always forthcoming, for the likes of you to swim alongside of these giants of the main! And even if your power to amuse them gratis were perennial, and you were suffered to live among them to that end for ever and a day, you would still be only Spratts! And the porpoises would only roll over you, and the sharks tell you to get out of the way, for you are not worth eating up. Even the great good-natured Whales, whose eye and smile you live to catch, would hold out a fin one day, only to pass you by the next! And lord! how your fellow-Spratts would laugh when they heard of it all!

Had you but been a little less high and mighty, you might have commingled with another kind of fish, and not a low-class fish 85