He went late to a small college at Cambridge, endowed in the fifteenth century by some ancestral Hazeldean; and left it, on coming of age, without taking a degree.

A few years afterwards he married a young lady, country born and bred like himself.
Meanwhile his half-brother, Audley Egerton, may be said to have begun his initiation into the beau monde before he had well cast aside his coral and bells; he had been fondled in the lap of duchesses, and had galloped across the room astride on the canes of ambassadors and princes.

For Colonel Egerton was not only very highly connected, not only one of the Dii majores of fashion, but he had the still rarer good fortune to be an exceedingly popular man with all who knew him,--so popular, that even the fine ladies whom he had adored and abandoned forgave him for marrying out of "the set," and continued to be as friendly as if he had not married at all.

People who were commonly called heartless were never weary of doing kind things to the Egertons.
When the time came for Audley to leave the preparatory school at which his infancy budded forth amongst the stateliest of the little lilies of the field, and go to Eton, half the fifth and sixth forms had been canvassed to be exceedingly civil to young Egerton.

The boy soon showed that he inherited his father's talent for acquiring popularity, and that to this talent he added those which put popularity to use.