She was proud of his singularly good looks, and his
wickedness interested her, and she gave him more money than to all the
best public charities to which she contributed put together. Devereux,
indeed, being a fast man, with such acres as he inherited, which
certainly did not reach a thousand, mortgaged pretty smartly, and with
as much personal debt beside, of the fashionable and refined sort, as
became a young buck of bright though doubtful expectations--and if the
truth must be owned, sometimes pretty nearly pushed into a corner--was
beholden, not only for his fun, but, occasionally for his daily bread
and even his liberty, to those benevolent doles.
He did not like her peremptory summons; but he could not afford to
quarrel with his bread and butter, nor to kill by undutiful behaviour
the fair, plump bird whose golden eggs were so very convenient. I don't
know whether there may not have been some slight sign in the
handwriting--in a phrase, perhaps, or in the structure of the
composition, which a clever analysis might have detected, and which only
reached him vaguely, with a foreboding that he was not to see Chapelizod
again so soon as usual when this trip was made.
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