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 point. He could not help contrasting it with the surroundings and life in which he had so lately figured. Brought up as he had been, in the lavish, careless luxury of his beautiful but nomadic mother, he had from earliest childhood consorted with men of fashion and women of that nameless world, where good manners are by no means unusual, and where luxury is a necessity. Later, as he grew old enough to be observing, and also a living remark upon the age of the lovely Judith Grosifa, he had been sent away to school in England, till the woeful day when the master learned of his antecedents and turned him out. Then two years at a Lycée in Paris, till at fourteen he found himself an orphan, with but little to his name, and that name uncertain. He had known it all in his life of three and thirty years—good and ill, poverty and riches, ambitions, hopes and fears, hardly a rung in life's ladder but at some time had supported him. He was used to changes, but somehow his gorge rose at his surroundings, and he longed desperately to be on a level with that distant image of all good—Victoria. 276