A novel, idly skimmed over in bed, was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading the papers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, he was too constantly supplied from the world about him with amusement and variety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietly fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, without even the trouble of pulling the strings.

He had naturally considerable talents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might have been as brainless as a mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain.
"If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I'd use such wits as I have: but why should I now ?" he said on one occasion, when a fair lady reproached him with this inertia.

"The best style is only just to say yes or no--and be bored even in saying that--and a very comfortable style it is, too.

You get amused without the trouble of opening your lips." "But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then?
You would not get amused," suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.
"Well--everybody is, pretty nearly," said Bertie; "but there are always a lot of fellows who give their wits to get their dinners--social rockets, you know--who will always fire themselves off to sparkle instead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get them a card for good houses.

It saves you so much trouble; it is such a bore to have to talk." He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good houses, midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; making his bow in a Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same flirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment at a Premier's At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an ambassadress' drawing room, and winding up the series by a dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.
When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five o'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours' time, without the slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy, dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.
"Here--get me to perch as quick as you can, Rake," he murmured, dropping into an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standing by him instead the boy Berkeley.