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254 with a projecting gem of several large facets. Once only, in the midst of a game of whist, he broke out with a single comment.

'Hawkins was made an earl,' said Charles, speaking of some London acquaintance.

'What for?' asked the Senator.

'Successful adulteration,' said the poet tartly.

'Honours are easy,' the magazine editor put in.

'And two by tricks to Sir Charles,' the poet added.

Towards the close of the evening, however—the poet still remaining moody, not to say positively grumpy—Senator Wrengold proposed a friendly game of Swedish poker. It was the latest fashionable variant in Western society on the old gambling round, and few of us knew it, save the omniscient poet and the magazine editor. It turned out afterwards that Wrengold proposed that particular game because he had heard Coleyard observe at the Lotus Club the same afternoon that it was a favourite amusement of his. Now, however, for a while he objected to playing. He was a poor man, he said, and the rest were all rich; why should he throw away the value of a dozen golden sonnets just to add one more pinnacle to the gilded roofs of a millionaire's palace? Besides, he was half-way through with an ode he was inditing to Republican simplicity. The pristine austerity of a democratic senatorial cottage had naturally inspired him with memories of Dentatus, the Fabii, Camillus. But