But he was no easy mark, no mere degenerate who hacked off great chunks of a splendid fortune for the sake of violent exercise.

He was too indolent for violence, too inherently fastidious for degeneracy.

And deep down somewhere in a nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the fag end of that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied and maligned.

Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type of face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes, and a deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression of strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women.

It was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of the spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the fluff and thistledown of life.