Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a sort of
conviction that the German race would set everything square. He stood
either to make a very good thing on it or to be very heavily bit. There
could be no medium. He never hedged in his life; and as it was almost
a practical impossibility that anything the foreign stables could get
together would even be able to land within half a dozen lengths of
the King. Cecil, always willing to console himself, and invariably too
careless to take the chance of adverse accident into account, had come
to Baden, and was amusing himself there dropping a Friedrich d'Or on the
rouge, flirting in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady
Guenevere down the ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene Highness,
supping with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupying rooms that a Russian
Prince had had before him, with all the serenity of a millionaire, as
far as memory of money went; with much more than the serenity in other
matters of most millionaires, who, finding themselves uncommonly ill
at ease in the pot-pourri of monarchs and ministers, of beau-monde and
demi-monde, would have given half their newly turned thousands to get
rid of the odor of Capel Court and the Bourse, and to attain the calm,
negligent assurance, the easy, tranquil insolence, the nonchalance with
Princes, and the supremacy among the Free Lances, which they saw and
coveted in the indolent Guardsman.
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