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Lord Prelice felt desperately bored. Like Xeres, he longed for some new pleasure, yet knew not where to look for one. This was the result of being surfeited with the sweets of extraordinary good fortune. Born to a title, endowed with passable good looks, gifted with abilities above the average, and possessed of admirable health, he should have been the happiest of men; the more especially as his income ran well into five figures, and he had the whole wide world to play with. Certainly he had played with it and with life, up to his present age of thirty-five years. Perhaps this was the reason of his acute boredom. If all work and no play makes Jack dull; all play and no work must necessarily make him blase. Therefore, in spite of the excellent breakfast spread before him on this bright summer morning, when London was looking at its best, the young man was ungratefully wondering what he could do to render life endurable. He ate from habit and not because he enjoyed his food; he read the morning papers, since it was necessary to be abreast of the times, for conversational purposes, although very little was new therein and still less was true. By the time he arrived at the marmalade stage of the meal he was again considering the possibilities of the next four and twenty hours. In this discontented frame of mind he was discovered by his aunt. Lady Sophia Haken bustled into the pleasant room exasperatingly cheerful, and very pleased with life in general and with herself in particular. She was an elderly woman of a somewhat masculine type who lived a simple out-of-door existence, and who proclaimed loudly that it was necessary for humanity to return to the Stone Age for true enjoyment. Having been riding in the Row for the last two hours, she entered in her habit, filled with the egotism of the early riser. As a near relative, she could not do less than scold Prelice for lingering over a late breakfast, and told him,—also as a near relative—that she scolded him for his good. She had done so very often before without result, and, but that she loved to lay down the law, would have long since given over the attempt to improve her nephew. Nevertheless, anxious to achieve the impossible, she attacked him with pristine vigor, as though aware for the first time of his bad habits.