He has no intention at present of marrying, since even to marry a rich wife would interfere with his career, and he is certainly incapable of falling in love with a poor one. Indeed he neither falls in love nor pretends to with anybody, not being of the type that desires amorous, or even philandering adventure. The motto of his life is ‘Comfort,’ and on his £600 a year, he finds that warm houses, good cooks, the use of motor-cars, all the things in fact which supply the wadding of life and take away its sharp cold angles are well within his reach. He is an excellent handler of money, has no debts at all, and last season even managed to have a stall at the opera two nights a week. This again proved an excellent investment, for he often gave it away in remunerative quarters, and when he occupied it himself, spent all the time between the acts in visiting the boxes of his friends, and pointing them out any celebrity who might happen to be present. Nowadays he knows them all by sight, and so has less cause to read the Society journals. The time that he used to give to that he now spends more healthily in walking swiftly for an hour every morning round the Serpentine, for he is beginning to exhibit slight signs of stoutness. But he hopes with this increase of exercise to keep at bay the threatened increase of weight. When he meets another piping bullfinch, he is dexterous in his cordiality, and by urging him indefinitely to come to his ‘diggings,’ often secures a definite invitation.
Leonard has now been a full-fledged piping bullfinch for eight years and has arrived at the age of thirty-four. Since he is not in the least ashamed of his whole life, there is probably no one in the world who has less to be ashamed of. Neither the ten commandments, nor the grand text in Galatians which entails twenty-nine distinct damnations can catch him tripping. He is uniformly good-natured, he has never set himself to make his way by telling scandalous stories about other people, he pays his debts, he is perfectly honest, almost abstemiously sober, and the more closely you cross-examine him, the more spotlessly free from any sort of vice does he seem to be. Only, if you stand a little way off, so to speak, and take a general view of him, he is somehow horrible to look upon, for it would seem that he has no soul of any kind, either good or bad. And that, when all is said and done, is a grave defect: there is nothing there, and it is just that which is the matter with him. All those delicious dinners feed a non-existent thing; all those nice clothes clothe it; all his amiable conversation reveals it.