Persuasion

Meanwhile, Mrs. Mortimer led him about with the confidence that was her perquisite; and the chances were that in due time he would have house-parties of his own at Black Fells--not the kind he had wisely denied himself the pleasure of giving, with such neighbours as the Ferralls to observe, but the sort he desired. However, there were many things to be accomplished for him and by him before he could expect to use his great yacht and his estates and his shooting boxes and the vast granite mansion recently completed and facing Central Park just north of the new palaces built on the edges of the outer desert where Fifth Avenue fringes the hundreds.

Meanwhile, he had become in a measure domesticated at Shotover, and Shotover people gradually came to ride, drive, and motor over the Fells, which was a good beginning, though not necessarily a promise for anything definite in the future.

Mortimer, riding a huge chestnut--he could still wedge himself into a saddle--had now made it a regular practice to affect the jocular early-bird squire, and drag Plank out of bed. And Plank, in no position to be anything but flattered by such sans gêne, laboriously and gratefully splashed through his bath, wallowed amid the breakfast plates, and mounted a hunter for long and apparently aimless gallops with Mortimer.

His acquaintance among people who knew Mortimer being limited, he had no means of determining the latter's social value except through hearsay and a toadying newspaper or two. Therefore he was not yet aware of Mortimer's perennial need of money; and when Mortimer laughingly alluded to his poverty, Plank accepted the proposition in a purely comparative sense, and laughed, too, his thrifty Dutch soul untroubled by misgivings.